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WILLIAM JAMES AND 
HENRI BERGSON 



V 



THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 



Agents 
THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON AND EDINBURGH 

THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 

TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO 

KARL W. HIERSEMANN 

LEIPZIG 

THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 

NEW YOEK 






WILLIAM JAMES AND 
HENRI BERGSON 



A STUDY IN CONTRASTING THEORIES 
OF LIFE 



By 
Horace Meyer Kallen, Ph.D. 

of the University of Wisconsin 




THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 



.£ 



-p 



&*" 



Copyright 1914 By 
The University of Chicago 



All Rights Reserved 



Published October 1914 



Composed and Printed By 

The University of Chicago Press 

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 

QGT 17 1914 

. vJt 



.A387072 



TO 

WILLIAM JAMES 
My Master 



PREFACE 

In the spring of 191 2 I was asked to give a 
series of talks on the relation between the 
philosophies of William James and Henri 
Bergson. This book is the outcome of the 
meditations which compliance with that request 
demanded. I have sought in it to draw the 
" counterfeit presentment of two brothers," 
brothers in that they are the children of the 
same age, that the same blood of its character- 
istic and perhaps unique tradition runs in the 
veins of their thought, and also, it may be, in 
that their individualities are so strikingly dis- 
tinct and unique. 

"There is," William James writes somewhere, 
"very little difference between one man and 
another; but what little there is, is very im- 
portant." The difference between James and 
Bergson has seemed to me much more than 
little, and of an importance difficult to calculate 
in advance; for the difference turns on what is 
ultimately a philosophic prevision of the future 
and a philosophic summation of the past. 



viii Preface 

James's theory of life seems to me to face for- 
ward, to be an expression of the age's underly- 
ing and hence vaguely felt and unformulated 
tendencies. Bergson's theory of life sums it- 
self up as a consummation of the philosophic 
tradition, restated in the modes of thought and 
harmonized with the modes of feeling of the age. 
For this reason it has been easier to portray 
Bergson's philosophy than James's. Bergson 
has a system in which there is logical relation 
between premise and conclusion, a relation so 
complete and integrative, indeed, that it is 
difficult to state any single opinion of Bergson's 
plausibly without becoming involved at once 
in a restatement of the whole system. His 
doctrines literally " interpenetrate," and have 
thus made necessary a certain amount of repe- 
tition in the exposition of them. To portray 
James's philosophy, on the contrary, has 
required much direct quotation, partly because 
of the novelty of his opinions, partly because of 
the existence of some difference among phi- 
losophers concerning just what was central 
and important in James's own mind. James, 



Preface ix 

more than any other protagonist in the history 
of thought, was free from that " certain blind- 
ness in human beings." His mind and eye were 
alert to the unique, the individual, hence the 
important, in all phases of life and reflection (it 
is said of him that he used to put an opponent's 
case better than his own); he could so think 
himself into a cause as to become, for the 
moment, dramatically identical with it, to the 
exclusion of everything else. His sympathetic 
and persuasive statement of one phase of the 
Bergsonian point of view, for example, has led 
many careless readers to regard him as a Berg- 
sonian; and of the position of the " psychical 
researchers," as a spiritist, and so on; while his 
readiness to entertain and to try out any philo- 
sophical hypothesis has led various readers to 
consider him irrevocably committed to this or 
that philosophic dogma. His attitude toward 
"panpsychism" (see the concluding passages in 
Some Problems of Philosophy) is an example. 

Now readers approaching so myriad-minded 
and empirical a thinker as James will, if they are 
philosophical, approach him with preconcep- 



x Preface 

tions, and if they are friendly, they will attrib- 
ute their preconceptions to him. The portraits 
they draw of him will consequently be far more 
expressive of their own views than of James's. 
If I seem to claim for the present portrait a 
greater authenticity, it is only because I acquired 
my own theory of life at his feet, and because 
in five years of close and intimate personal 
contact with him I attained to a definite per- 
ception of what he regarded as central and 
what tangential in his Weltanschauung. 

Of the six chapters of the book, two, in 
slightly different form, have been printed 
before, the first in the Philosophical Review, 
the fourth in Mind, and I acknowledge with 
thanks the editors' permissions to reprint these 
chapters. To my friends Dr. H. M. Sheffer, 
Mr. Alfred D. Sheffield, and Dr. H. G. Brown 
I owe a greater debt than I can repay for 
careful examination of the proofs and many 
valuable suggestions. 

Horace M. Kallen 

Boston, Massachusetts 
August 24, 191 4 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Radical Empiricism and the Philosophic 

Tradition i 

II. James, Bergson, and the "New Realism" 31 

III. The Method of Intuition and the Prag- 

matic Method 52 

IV. The Revelations of Intuition and the 

Discoveries of Pragmatism ... 103 

V. Divinity—Its Nature and Its R6le in 

Human Affairs .179 

VI. The Origin and Destiny of Man . . 206 

Index 243 



XI 



CHAPTER I 

RADICAL EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILO- 
SOPHIC TRADITION 

The vision of the philosopher and the per- 
ception of the artist have this in common: they 
both ingest an existence alien in its nature and 
interests to the human mind, and they both 
re-create it, giving it color and form which the 
soul desires but does not find, character and 
effects which the spirit yearns for but cannot 
discover. The marbles of Phidias and the phi- 
losophy of Plato, the canvases of Raphael and 
the conceptions of Descartes, the poems of 
Goethe and the dialectic of Hegel, all obey the 
same impulse and express the same will — an im- 
pulse to make over unsuitable realities into 
satisfactory ideas, a will to remodel discordant 
nature into happy civilization. Indeed, all 
cultures own this parentage, and rest, together 
with philosophy and art, the inevitable off- 
spring of the creative imagination. Experience 
as it comes, comes full of shocks and checks: 



2 William James and Henri Bergson 

it obstructs the will, it deceives the mind, it 
disrupts into tumult the even, onward flow of 
life. The will seeks the good and finds evil; 
the mind desires order and encounters disorder; 
life seeks to expand into the harmonies of its 
kind and finds itself constricted, repressed, and 
even self-opposed. Plural, chaotic, always full 
of a potential menace, experience, coming so, 
is not to be endured. The mind must of its 
own motion make it over, and its re-creations 
are the arts and philosophy. A painted fire 
pleases without burning, a sculptured hero 
has power to delight without power to destroy. 
But the creations of the artist are at once less 
radical and more enduring than the creations 
of the philosopher. The artist works upon the 
solid stuff of experience itself, eliminating, add- 
ing, molding, until this stuff bears the shape 
of his heart's desire. The philosopher, how- 
ever, tends to spurn altogether the stuff of 
experience and to carve a world of his desire 
alone. Is felt reality manifold, embattled, 
chaotic? The philosopher casts it aside; as 
such, it is mere appearance: true reality is one, 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 3 

harmonious, orderly. Is felt reality alien in 
substance, oppugnant to man in its nature and 
effects ? So, it is to be set aside as mere appear- 
ance: its real nature is spiritual, its true face 
is the face of God. Do the actualities of expe- 
rience show human life ever-ending in its 
period, never continued? Then these actuali- 
ties are false actualities, pure deception: in 
fact and in truth each man's life goes on 
unceasingly. Does the world offer hindrances 
in all directions to life's free flow, frustrating 
its desires, betraying its interests, binding its 
every movement with a chain of causes ? This 
behavior of the world must be set aside as mere 
appearance: in reality man is in no sense bond, 
his desires are already attained, his interests 
accomplished, his spontaneity assured. In brief, 
the universe, like a Japanese mummer, wears 
a hideous mask of multiplicity, materiality, 
necessity, and death, behind which whoever 
will look may behold the joyous features of its 
unity and spirituality, its assurance of human 
immortality and human freedom. These are the 
traits of the real; all else is mere appearance. 



__ 



4 William James and Henri Bergson 

And so, from Thales to Royce, philosophy has 
concerned itself with seeking proof, almost un- 
exceptionally, for one or all of these four desid- 
erates — the unity of the world; the existence 
of God, in some form of spiritistic substance, 
from theism to pantheism; the immortality of 
the soul; the freedom of the will. At the very 
least, the unity of the world was asserted. 
Even materialisms and atheisms refused to 
concede that to the actualities of experience. 
And as the full quota of these excellences, said 
to lie beneath and to support the flux, cannot 
without logical contradiction all be defended 
at once, most systems of philosophy are content 
with defending two, or at most three, of them. 
Thus the unity of the world is incompatible 
with the freedom of the will, the freedom of 
the will with the existence of an omnipotent, 
omniscient, and well-disposed God. Individual 
immortality is oppugnant to cosmic unity, and 
cosmic unity to theistic divinity. These oppug- 
nances, coupled with the mind's natural demand 
for logical consistency, have given rise to the 
typical philosophic " problems/' and in the 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 5 

shuffle of adjudicating the rights of the " prob- 
lems" by dialectic the data of immediate expe- 
rience have been completely neglected. When 
these did get any consideration whatever, 
beyond such consideration as is implied in 
neglect, they were at once transmuted by 
means of " forms of the understanding" or of 
"unknowables" into the substance of some 
desiderate; and when it was acknowledged, as 
by Kant, that the data of immediate experience 
could not in these forms yield any proof of the 
sublime desiderates, they were segregated from 
experience, and the desiderates were enacted 
into postulates of conduct. This compromise, 
which was rather a refusal to face the meta- 
physical dilemma than a resolution thereof, 
could not endure. Kant's chief contribution 
to the history of philosophy is the dialectic 
triad of the transcendental method. Tran- 
scendentalism itself goes, however, the way of 
traditional metaphysics, substituting in the 
ancient way desiderates for data, ideals for 
facts. It is, in a word, no less than the older 
metaphysic, essentially the vicarious fulfilment 



6 William James and Henri Bergson 

of unsatisfied desire, a compensation in dis- 
course for a disappointment in reality. 

The metaphysical tradition is not, however, 
the only tradition designated by the term 
" philosophy.' ' This term once meant the 
total field of thinking about experience. As, 
in the course of time, various special ranges of 
thought became enriched with collections of 
accurately observed data, yielding a common 
formula descriptive of their behavior, these 
dropped off and became special sciences. 
Mathematics was probably first, then astron- 
omy, then physics, and in the three hundred 
years' duration of modern positive science all 
the special sciences whose names are now so 
familiar. One range of investigation seems 
none the less indissolubly linked to philosophy: 
this range is the human mind, for it is the mind's 
ultimate aims and inward character that phi- 
losophy seeks to make reality conform to. 
Now those philosophers who are known as 
the English empiricists devoted themselves 
almost exclusively to a study of the human 
mind, its content, its behavior, its laws. They 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 7 

are known, significantly, as philosophers, not 
as psychologists, and though psychology makes 
today pretensions to being a positive science, 
it is not less closely allied to philosophy than 
in the days of Locke and Hartley and Hume. 
The empirical bias of these Englishmen gave 
them this superiority over the traditional 
metaphysicians: they tended to face mental 
facts as facts, not in the light of compensatory 
desiderates. The "problem" concerning these 
latter did indeed, as Locke tells us, give rise to 
his investigations, and it is true that Berkeley 
made a metaphysical special plea by means 
of his researches. But in the long run they did 
face the facts, and the outcome of the tradition 
in Hume's famous conclusions was nearer 
envisaging the actual processes of experience 
than anything prior or contemporary. 

Nearer, I say. But nearer only when the 
experiential flux itself or the human mind taken 
in isolation is not too closely scrutinized. With 
respect to both of these, important or essential 
data were missed or translated, not permitted 
to speak for themselves. Principles, relations, 



8 William James and Henri Bergson 

connections, denied to reality, were unwittingly 
set in the mind, and the opposition between 
the mind and reality was made such that the 
former's integral place in the latter was ignored. 
Take the case of " necessary connexion." 
This Hume reduced to a psychological habit of 
expectation, setting this relation altogether in 
the mind. But in so doing he failed to observe 
that acquiring a habit demands just that kind 
of modifiability designated by " necessary con- 
nexion/' and that hence, in crediting the mind 
with an acquired habit, he credited the universe 
in so far forth with an actually experienced 
" necessary connexion." The fact is that the 
same desideration which claims for unity in the 
world a reality superior to diversity claims for 
unity in discourse a truth superior to diversity. 
Hume was as much a rationalist in his pro- 
cedure as he was an empiricist in his conclu- 
sions. The logical implications of premise and 
consequence were in fact of greater importance 
to him than the actual oppugnances and 
counter-implications of experience. He aimed, 
not to be correct, but to be consistent. And 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition g 

in his attempt to be consistent, i.e., to move 
only within the range of chosen premises to 
their logical conclusions, he missed envisaging 
reality as it is and substituted therefor a 
picture-reality logically deduced. 

Now such a picture, like an artist's drawing, 
will have that unity and consistency and sat- 
isfactoriness which the mind desiderates from 
all things. But these are always attained at 
the cost of ehminating "irrelevancies," solving 
"contradictions/' dressing up facts, whether 
or no. And all the while, just these "irrele- 
vancies," just these " contradictions," just 
these bare facts have in and of themselves the 
same right and status in reality as the data 
saved and transformed. The first to recognize 
and acknowledge this right was William James. 1 
Where, throughout the nineteenth century, 
philosophers persisted either in discriminating 
between appearance and reality in such wise 
as to formulate reality in one or all of the 

1 Cf. "On Some Omissions of Introspective Pyschology," 
Mind, IX (1884), 1-26; The Will to Believe, p. 299: "What 
Psychical Research Has Accomplished." 



io William James and Henri Bergs on 

compensatory terms of God, freedom, immortal- 
ity, and cosmic unity; or where, in response to 
the pressure of rapidly growing sciences, men 
faced fact, only to change it in such wise as 
thereby to satisfy the inner need for " logical 
consistency," James insisted that each event of 
experience must be acknowledged for what it 
appears to be, and heard for its own claims. 
To neither doubt nor belief, datum nor pref- 
erence, term nor relation, value nor fact, did 
he concede superiority over the others. Each 
had for him the same metaphysical claim, the 
same right to opportunity to make that claim 
good. Hence he pointed out to the rationalist 
the co-ordinate presence in experience of so 
much more than reason; he called the monist's 
attention to the world's diversity; the plural- 
isms to its unity. He said to the materialist: 
You shall not shut your eyes to the immaterial; 
to the spiritualist: You shall take cognizance 
also of the non-spiritual. He was a rationalist 
without unreason, an empiricist without preju- 
dice. His empiricism was radical, preferring 
correctness to consistency, truth to logic. All 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition n 

things, he urged, however and whenever they 
occur in experience, must be taken at their face 
value, for what they are as they occur, and they 
must not be mistrusted until they have proved 
themselves untrustworthy. Pure experience 
knows no favorites. It admits into reality, 
without making over, evil as well as good, dis- 
continuities as well as continuities, unhuman 
as well as human, plurality as well as unity, 
chance and novelty as well as order and law. 
It is a record and a description, not a trans- 
mutation; an expression, not a compensation. 
As a philosophy its principle is that of direct 
democracy, and William James, who first gave 
it voice, is the first democrat in metaphysics. 

Now democratic metaphysics does not readily 
submit to systematization. A philosophic sys- 
tem is essentially a work of art. Like a picture 
or a drama or a symphony, it is the cunning 
arrangement of certain selected premises and 
their explication, according to dialectic law. 
It invariably omits more than it envisages, 
alters and harmonizes all that it touches, con- 
cerns itself, in a word, with consistency rather 



12 William James and Henri Bergson 

than with truth. There is no philosophic 
turpitude in errors of fact; the metaphysician's 
unpardonable sin lies in error of form, in self- 
contradiction. His reputation, like the paint- 
er's, tends to depend far more on his technique 
than on his subject-matter. The universe, 
however, exceeds technique. A systematic 
treatment of it harmonious with correctness 
is out of question. On every side appear "in- 
consistencies" and "irrelevancies" demanding 
equal treatment with the favored instances, 
claiming to be, no less than those, essentials. 
Each datum, moreover, offers its own seductive 
implications; each crosses, penetrates into, 
and interferes with, others. Reality comes, 
from moment to moment, as an infinite melange 
of systems, never as system in itself. But 
reality, coming so, comes as every man must 
meet it in perception, when it compels his atten- 
tion on peril of his life, challenging him to 
choose which of its protean faces he will, to 
engage and to conquer. Hence, what this 
challenge evokes from him actually cannot be 
a special envisagement of his perception's 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 13 

never-completed total, called philosophy. He 
is required to operate rather than to envisage, 
to save himself rather than to see. And he 
meets the requirement by a method of treating 
reality piecemeal, which under one set of cir- 
cumstances is common-sense; under another, 
science; under another, religion; under another, 
art; under still another, philosophy. In each 
case one particular bit or combination of bits 
of reality is used as an instrument to render 
the residuum more congenial to mankind; each 
is a special sort of tool, serving a common end. 
And a system of philosophy is nothing more. 
It harnesses the universe in the lines of some 
preferred order, making it more akin to man 
and more amenable to his interests. No less 
so do common-sense, religion, art, and science. 
They all unify, assure, conserve. They are all 
tools and modes of life, and are all as such 
pragmatic. 

If this be true, pragmatism is not merely 
a new name for old ways of thinking; it is a 
new name for all ways of thinking. In view of 
the general attitude of its opponents, of the 



14 William James and Henri Bergs on 

elaborate instruments of argumentation set in 
motion against it, of the appearance of new 
overshadowing issues, this observation gets the 
twist of paradox, for in the light of it the oppo- 
nents must have been stultifying merely them- 
selves, not the pragmatists. Yet nothing could 
have been more natural than the controversy 
over pragmatism, and nothing more inevitable 
than the shift of ground to other issues. 

To begin with, it is only through the expli- 
cation of the pragmatic rule itself that thinkers 
became conscious of the motives which, in the 
spirit's deep, underlie the persistent construc- 
tion of philosophies. In ancient times the 
Aristotelian wonder had been accepted as suffi- 
cient; and this wonder stirred no further 
wonder about its own nature and origin, the in- 
timacy of the sentiment and its ultimacy being 
undistinguished. The mediae vals wished only 
to reconcile brute experience with the Christian 
theory of life, and held the purpose of phi- 
losophy to be the confirmation of theology. 
That theology itself is only philosophy of a 
particular flavor and color, they failed, on the 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 15 

whole, to observe. They held it simply and 
frankly for a method of confirming desiderates 
whose existence was an unquestioned dogma. 
The " critical philosophy" was the first expli- 
citly to deny confirmatory powers to meta- 
physics and veridical assurance to theology, but 
it reserved the desiderates of both as the sine 
qua non of conduct, and demonstrated God 
and freedom and immortality by the needs of 
action, as it demonstrated unity by the "laws 
of thought." But these needs and these laws 
remained unquestioned dogmas, no less unwar- 
ranted by the processes of experience than the 
desiderates of the mediae vals. Schopenhauer 
sought to found philosophy on the "conscious- 
ness that the non-existence of the world is just 
as possible as its existence." This was going 
deep, but it was not going down to an inspection 
of this consciousness and the possibilities that 
it recognized. It remained for him an ultimate 
fact, whereas it is not ultimate at all, being no 
more than barest schematic formulation of the 
growing experiential flux, of becoming, where 
things truly are and are not at the same time, 



1 6 William James and Henri Bergson 

and hence compel the mind to special alertness. 
Schopenhauer was perhaps the last, till William 
James, to have been troubled about the origin 
of metaphysics. Philosophers of our own age 
concerned themselves little about the spring 
and origin of their speculative activity. Their 
interest in philosophy was, on the whole, pro- 
fessional rather than human; for them thinking 
has turned into a self-sufficing exercise in dia- 
lectic, where it used to be an adaptation to a 
not over-kindly world. Philosophy has fallen 
into the position of a toper whose first drink 
was taken to save his life and who ever after- 
ward lived to drink. In a word, philosophy is 
gripped by the inveterate habit of hypostatiz- 
ing the instrument. 

Hypostasis of the instrument is not the 
peculiar vice of philosophy alone. When sci- 
ence sacrifices observed fact to hypothetic 
law, when art conserves a technique, such as 
impressionism, and foregoes beauty, when gov- 
ernment puts the perfection of its machinery 
above the happiness of the people, when reli- 
gion wars over doctrine and ritual and neglects 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 17 

salvation, there occurs hypostasis of the instru- 
ment. The reason is not far to seek. The 
world we live in is one in which we happened, 
not one which was made for us. If it had 
been made for us we should not live in it as 
we do. Existence would have been beatitude 
and thought divinity, self-absorbed and self- 
possessed. But we live only at the risk of life 
and only too often barter living for a living. 
In every region of experience, from ideals to 
things, there is a struggle to be, as utter and 
profound as it is implacable. In every region 
very few are the fit who survive. Not a 
moment's thought, not a pleasure felt, nor an 
idea realized, but keeps its head above the flux 
at the cost of innumerable suppressed and lost. 
What is man but a battle-field of interests, a 
field of a few dominant ones and a horde 
starving, unfulfilled ? To possess little he must 
forego much, and what he lives by, what keeps 
him in so far forth, unsubmerged, becomes 
the more precious for what it has cost. It is 
the all-saving tool, won at great hazard, used 
with constant risk, and preserved with constant 



1 8 William James and Henri Bergson 

cost. A hypothesis, a religion, a form of gov- 
ernment sweeps all appropriate data under 
its beneficent control, divests them of their 
power to harm, prepares them to feed the proper 
life of man. To conserve these, henceforward, 
becomes more important than the conservation 
of their end. For their end, although no less 
than they, fleeting and elusive, is still inalien- 
able; in its manifold intimacy of feeling, life's 
goal is everywhere no more than life. But the 
instrument, fashioned always of some especial 
fragment selected from the experiential com- 
plex, is not so inalienable. Initially it is a 
nature foreign to man's, distrained from its 
own ways to life's uses, and at every moment 
it may slip from the hands and go those ways. 
Hence it becomes an ultimate concern. It 
signifies inward possession, where the goal sig- 
nifies only desire; it is the key to the heaven 
where the treasure is laid up, while the goal is 
only the yearning for the treasure, an uneasi- 
ness and irritation until possessed. Inevita- 
bly, therefore, the instrument, being always the 
more immediate and certain possession, assumes 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 19 

a constantly greater importance, and ends like 
the Arab's camel, by crowding its master out 
of the tent. There arises a worship of the 
instrument. And about this worshipful object 
is it that men fight their greatest quarrels in 
science and religion and philosophy. What 
could have been more bitter than the quarrel 
between the theologians and Galileo, on the 
theologians' side? The fact announced by 
Galileo made a cherished instrument useless. 
Or the feeling among theologians themselves 
concerning such questions as: Shall the priest 
use three or two fingers in uttering the bene- 
diction? Does the miracle of transubstantia- 
tion occur in the sacrament ? Are indulgences 
valid? Is grace better had by partial or 
by total immersion? Is the pope infallible? 
These are matters, among numberless others, 
the Christian world has not ceased to quarrel 
about. They are notably merely means; the 
end, salvation, all Christians are agreed on. 
Or more largely : What was the issue in the wars 
of opposed faiths, as between Moslems and 
Christians? Not heaven, nor yet the nature 



20 William James and Henri Bergs on 

of God. Concerning these there is no incon- 
siderable unanimity. The issue concerns the 
instruments whereby these are to be attained 
— Mohammed the prophet of Allah versus 
Jesus the only-begotten son of God. Or yet 
in art, do men quarrel about beauty or about 
technique? The impressionist against the 
realist, the futurist against the classicist, defend 
means of painting, making these the paramount 
issue, and forgetting the end in the means. 
There is no need to multiply examples: men 
tend to differ chiefly about instruments. They 
do not quarrel about the wine, they quarrel 
about the bottles. 

Philosophy is perhaps least of all exempt from 
this quarrel. The end which philosophers seek 
is the same. The empirical reality they seek it 
in is the same. The urgency that compels the 
search is the same. Schools and systems do 
not debate about starting-points and stopping- 
places. They debate about vehicles of transit. 
Do we secure ourselves in experience more 
effectively by thinking the world in terms of 
matter or in terms of spirit ? Do we gain our 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 21 

ends better by thinking reality as altogether 
free or altogether bond? as one or many? a 
block or a sandheap ? as divinely controlled or 
as mechanical? as ultimately good or ulti- 
mately bad ? Each of these predicating words, 
if it means anything at all, means some specific 
datum of immediate experience, one of an 
infinite number of such in the warring flux. 
And according to the answer you choose to 
make to any of these questions you refashion 
this vast residuum in the image of this one and 
announce it to behave after the manner of this 
one. So, you unify all your world, are pre- 
pared for the chances and shocks of new expe- 
rience, and go your way rejoicing. Your phi- 
losophy becomes your most precious possession, 
your device eternally and happily to rest in 
harmony with the residual universe; becomes, 
hence, the source and unshakable foundation 
of the reality of this end, and so itself alone, 
and not the residuum, the content and standard 
of creation. Instrument and end have changed 
places. No longer is it a question of the ade- 
quacy of the system to secure you in the world; 



22 William James and Henri Bergson 

it is a question of the adequacy of the world to 
measure up to your standard system. If the 
world doesn't, so much the worse for the world. 
You then call it mere appearance. The true 
and abiding reality is your system. 

Now, there are very many systems and each 
lays practically exclusive claim to the salva- 
tional power of metaphysical truth. Each 
refuses to be enumerated over a common 
denominator. But pragmatism, with its demo- 
cratic presupposition in metaphysics, its per- 
ception that philosophy is fundamentally a 
method of using pieces of reality to control the 
remainder, but that it can never be a vision of 
the total, is just such an enumeration. For 
pragmatism all systems start on the same level; 
their opportunities are equal, and the supe- 
riority of one over another is eventual, not pri- 
mary; to be achieved by works, not by an 
inborn and inoperative gift. To envisage phi- 
losophies thus is, however, to restore to per- 
ception the older relations of thoughts and 
things; it is to recall metaphysics to its origi- 
nal status and forgotten business. There was 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 23 

vexation in such a call, inevitably; and not a 
little of the controversy about pragmatism 
sprang from this unanalyzed vexation, sprang 
as a defense, against pragmatist challenge, of 
the hypostasis of the instrument which all 
compensational systems practice. 1 

But, furthermore, the exposition of prag- 
matism, the method and theory of truth, went 
on without much consideration of the undis- 
criminated immediacies of experience (the 
subject-matter of radical empiricism) to control 
which method was born. The exposition 
looked back, when it did look back, to science 

1 It is such hypos tatizing treatment that gave rise to the 
much-debated analysis of pragmatism into thirteen mutually 
exclusive and contradictory varieties. But it is clear that there 
may easily be an infinite number of such, which, different, and 
even oppugnant with respect to each other, as hypostatized 
substances, will yet be unanimous and identical with respect 
to a common function. The Hon and the lamb are intrinsically 
inimical, but under appropriate conditions functionally agreed 
to aim at the same thing, the conservation by each of his own 
life. Rivals for the hand of the same woman may seek to cut 
each other's throats, but they will both be agreed in glorifying 
the beloved. And so on. Only the hypostatization of function 
or the identification of function with structure or substance can 
cause and constitute the incompatibilities of which pragmatism 
is accused. And this accusation is only another example of the 
hypostatizing habit of philosophy. 



24 William James and Henri Bergs on 

only; but chiefly it looked forward, deter- 
mining procedure in terms of " future conse- 
quences," desiderated and undesiderated. 
Now science itself is discriminative; and, 
though it rests more obviously than other 
human institutions on primary immediacies, 
the immediacies it handles are the primary ones 
already modified by such experience-stuffs as 
order and quantity. These pervasive contents 
ot reality are highly excellent; they facilitate, 
as little else save " spirit" is supposed to do, 
the mind's prosperous movements among other 
realities. They become therefore easily the 
foremost subjects of hypostasis, which then 
seems to dominate their total range of influ- 
ence. In scientific method, consequently, the 
opponents of pragmatism perceived what 
they thought was a morphological distinc- 
tion between hypothesis and truth, but what 
actually is a functional one, truth being prag- 
matically no more than fit hypothesis. But 
this was enough to cause anti-pragmatists to 
attribute to the pragmatic exposition, not the 
character of a description of the genesis and 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 25 

nature of method, but, by virtue of the psy- 
chologist's fallacy, the character belonging to 
their own systems as inoperative instruments, 
the character of one more hypostasis, additional 
to those already existing. The unavoidable 
stress on consequences, moreover, these being 
the goals of desire (marked by " satisfaction")? 
and thereby "terminal" to processes, served 
to divert attention somewhat too much from 
the situations out of which consequences grow, 
with the result that the momentary structure 
of method was substituted for its operative 
movement, even by pragmatists themselves. 
Pragmatism was then conceived, as by Papini, 
after the analogy of a hotel corridor which 
serves as a passageway for individual travelers 
to their respective metaphysical rooms. But 
in fact the metaphysical systems are not lodg- 
ings: the lodging is the reality to which these 
systems are applied. In fact, pragmatism is 
not a passageway : it is a common way of pass- 
ing, and each metaphysical system is a particu- 
larization of this common way. What was 
needful, therefore, for the right consideration 



26 William James and Henri Bergs on 

of pragmatism was the envisagement of the 
terminus a quo of method not less than the 
terminus ad quern, and particularly needful 
was the observation that method is a way of 
passing and not an architectonic of static intel- 
lectual faculties. But the hypostatizing mind 
comes to rest in its hypostasis while the endur- 
ing world flows away beneath. It is as unnatu- 
ral for that mind to conceive its system as an 
instrument as it is for the healthy person who 
is not a student of physiology to be aware that 
he is breathing, or the ruminative cow that she 
thinks. The discussion of method, hence, was 
never quite a discussion of method. It edged 
always toward prospective ultimacies and finally 
got lost in these. Interest turned to the logical 
as against the functional implications of method, 
and in consequence the field of analysis rapidly 
shifted. Humanists got accused of absolute 
idealism, pluralists of monism, all pragmatists 
of self-contradiction; there arose the formula 
of " absolute pragmatism," and so on, unend- 
ingly. None the less, in all this time, as the 
field got more and more explored, the terminus 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 27 

a quo of method received a progressively greater 
emphasis and the radical empiricism and ty- 
chism from which, in fact, pragmatic method 
naturally flows became the dominant interest 
of pragmatic thinkers. Controversy about 
method melted thus into controversy about 
reality. 

Radical empiricism aims, we have seen, to 
describe reality as it comes to cognition, to 
apprehend experience in its purity, before it 
has been worked on to satisfy our needs or 
remodeled to serve our interests. It refuses 
to act selectively, and by special emphasis on 
its selections to take the logical step which 
would drive it into a monism or an absolutism 
of any kind whatsoever. It lays no weightier 
emphasis on the mind than on nature, on envi- 
ronment than on organism, on concept than 
on percept. Being, for radical empiricism, is 
neutral, and demands chiefly a narrative of its 
behavior and a plan for meeting its events. 
These, radical empiricism points out, are the 
buds and bourgeons of a flux of a seething plu- 
rality of entities, each there, each trying to stay 



28 William James and Henri Bergson 

with if not on, and by the means of, its fellows. 
The "total," always exceeding itself from 
moment to moment, is not a whole, but an 
aggregate of eaches, each with a vote that it 
casts primarily for itself, each involving novel- 
ties, chances, mutations, and discretenesses 
as well as necessities and continuities and 
uniformities. These latter show themselves 
equally present in experience with the former, 
the former equally with the latter. Each has 
to be allowed for, whether or no. Thus, 
although recognizing human values, and indeed 
making them central, radical empiricism refuses 
to distort the world, as idealisms do, that these 
values may be eternally conserved ; or to belittle 
value as such, as materialisms do, that the pre- 
ferred excellence of a type of order may seem 
omnipotent. It acknowledges, for all things 
equally with spirit, the righJt and the will and 
the struggle to be. It accepts on the same 
level with human aspiration all its conditions 
and incumbrances, extenuating nothing, miti- 
gating nothing, rejecting nothing, excusing 
nothing. Where it enforces, it enforces against 



Empiricism and Philosophic Tradition 29 

inadequate emphasis, as in the case of "the will 
to believe" ; where it defends, it defends against 
overemphasis and excess, as in its treatment of 
dogmatic naturalism. It seeks everywhere to 
avoid bias, and it is possible only when phi- 
losophy has ceased to be compensatory and 
has become expressive. 

But systems are, as we have seen, the out- 
come of bias, of a passion for logical unity, on 
the one side, and for the conservation of val- 
uable forms of existence, on the other. Hence 
radical empiricism is metaphysics which is 
expressible in an attitude, not in a system. It 
envisages the neutral starting-point from which 
all systems diverge and the common center 
into which, if alive and active, they converge. 
It is prior to systems just as life is prior to dis- 
course, and it absorbs and superyenes on them 
in the same way. What radical empiricism 
can endow systematic philosophy with, hence, 
is first of all freedom of direction, flexibility in 
observation and procedure, and, secondly, fresh 
and distinctive premises for dialectic con- 
struction. It keeps throwing ever-new data 



30 William James and Henri Bergson 

into the focus of philosophic attention, empha- 
sizing against the compensatory prejudice 
innumerable neglected contents of experience. 
Such are, for example, the observation of the 
democratic consubstantiality of every entity in 
experience with every other, of the existence 
of external relations, of the fluid and temporal 
nature of being. Start with any one of these 
as a premise, develop it with logical or senti- 
mental consistency, and you get genuinely 
fresh and novel systematic philosophies. The 
newer developments of metaphysics in the 
temporalism of Bergson and the staticism of 
the new realists are such logical or sentimental 
explications. 



CHAPTER II 

JAMES, BERGSON, AND THE "NEW REALISM" 

Picture, if you will, the encounter with the 
mighty ancients of some young, mid- Victorian 
doctor of philosophy, dead before his time 
and entered by mischance into Elysium instead 
of heaven. Stumbling, diffident, and slow, he 
moves among the shadowy cypresses and laurels, 
over the floor of asphodel, all of a yearning over 
strange shapes beautiful, and half afraid, so 
gray the sourceless iridescent light, so fleet 
the shapes, the sounds so fugitive. But soon, 
through the dim alleys, he beholds a bright- 
ness, fading toward him in decrescent slopings. 
Toward that he turns, as moth to flame, first 
hovering, uncertain, then with straight, swift 
rush. Not here, however, can fall the mothen 
fate, to drop swiftly with scorched wings. This 
light and glow cannot destroy: they revive 
and strengthen, making the spirit whole. They 
that live in it arise from their pleasant seats to 
bid him welcome — Socrates and all the host that 

31 



32 William James and Henri Bergs on 

followed after, Plato and Aristotle, Euclides, 
Judaean Philo, even Plotinos — breaking a dis- 
course of God, and the good, and man's soul 
everlasting. When he is refreshed they ask 
him, rare wanderer to Elysium since Christ 
brought forth his heaven, for news of the folk 
on earth. 

He considers. What is there, among the 
brave translunary things that men discourse 
upon and hunger for, unknown to these, 
Aristotelians all, from Plato to this latest day ? 
The living streams of thought live still with 
their life and shine with their colors. Shall 
he mention the new scholastics and their strain- 
ing Godward? the life of them is Aristotle, 
and his alone their force. Or the idealists, for 
whom God is everywhere, his essence visible 
to men in ecstatic vision? What holds that 
essence that Plotinos saw not, that Parmenides 
had not urged? And have not Epicureans 
and Stoics foreclosed all materialisms, and 
Skeptics and Academicians all criticisms? 
Contemporary philosophy, in so far as it em- 
bodies an actual and continuous tradition, con- 



James, Bergson, and "New Realism" 33 

tains nothing these Greeks had not presaged 
and foreshadowed — the persistent monism, the 
spiritualism, the devotion to eternity, to life, to 
the good. 

The new immortal, then, would be hard put 
to it to find for the ancient thinkers philosophic 
news. For that he would have needed to post- 
pone his advent into Elysium until the first 
decade of the twentieth century. He would 
have needed to mark the enormous growth of 
positive science, the development of ethics and 
social theory as a part of biology, the appli- 
cation of biological conceptions to the study of 
mind — in a word, the tremendously fructifying 
effect of the Darwinian hypothesis applied to 
all possible fields of investigation and endeavor. 
Then he would have needed to note the exten- 
sion of the field of application of this hypothesis 
until it became metaphysical, the consequent 
rise of radical empiricism and pragmatism, and 
the swift growth of philosophy in a genuinely 
fresh direction thereafter. This would have 
been genuine news to the ancients, of a 
philosophy having no semblance or echo of 



34 William James and Henri Bergs on 

anything they knew, neither even in Hera- 
cleitos nor Protagoras. For the rectilinear, 
indeterminate flow of existence envisaged in 
radical empiricism is altogether different from 
the Logos-dominated merging of everything into 
its opposite in the circular movement of exist- 
ence from fire to fire that Heracleitos thought 
to explain existence by. And the reputed 
formula of Protagoras is closer to subjectivism 
than to radical empiricism, for which existences 
must be given before they are judged. Man, 
thence, can be the measure only of the values 
and uses of things, not of their being. Only 
for the idealist is he the measure of their being, 
and with the idealists, until we have more data, 
Protagoras must be counted. The "new phi- 
losophy" is really new. 

But the "new philosophy" is not radical 
empiricism alone, nor yet pragmatism. These 
terms designate what was to be the matrix and 
coincident part of a much varying tendency, 
which ramified particularly into two specific 
systems, each a type of metaphysical con- 
struction turning about distinctly novel data 



J antes, Bergson, and "New Realism," 35 

first thrown into relief by the investigations of 
William James. 

.These philosophies are the "new realism" 
of Edwin Holt and others, and the "temporal- 
ism" or vitalism of Bergson. Both may be 
treated as systematic elaborations of one or 
more elements of experience that radical 
empiricism has thrown into the center of atten- 
tion. Thus the "new realism" tends to be 
democratic and pluralistic. It acknowledges 
the consubstantiality of every item of expe- 
rience save "internal relations" and "pure 
duration." Having found that the recognition 
of the externality of some relations is an effect- 
ive instrument in solving one or more vexatious 
metaphysical problems — such as that of the 
relation of the mind to its object — it forthwith 
hypostatizes the instrument and petrifies it 
into a universal dogma, and recuts all relations 
in accord with the pattern it so creates. The 
world it desiderates, consequently, is empirical 
and particularistic, but also inert and power- 
less. Change and motion and continuity — when 
they are not insinuated through the back-door 



36 William James and Henri Bergs on 

by being equated with relations — have to be 
attenuated to the condition of mere appear- 
ance, and cause must be frozen into a merely 
external relation holding forever between an 
antecedent and a consequent, i.e., into an 
ineffectually. Still further, the sole type 
of order in such a world is the order of the 
" identity-logic," the order of human reason. 
The world possesses, hence, for the "new real- 
ism" an architectonic unity, analogous to the 
unity of Plato's system of ideas, with the pro- 
found difference that this unity is assumed to 
be the actual content of experience, and not its 
archetype; that it is generated empirically and 
positivistically in the manner of Comte, and 
not teleologically as a form of self -reproduction 
of the good, which is the manner of Plato. 
The "new realism" is new because it is radical 
empiricism. It is allied to the philosophic 
tradition because it gives that empiricism a 
compensatory significance by means of the 
"speculative dogma" concerning the external- 
ity of relations and of the intimacy and warmth 
of formal logic taken as universally regulative. 



J antes, Bergson, and "New Realism" 37 

It has thus made hypostasis of two instruments, 
and by using formal logic and external relations 
as the measure of existence secures an unchal- 
lenged place among protagonists of the com- 
pensatory tradition. 

To formulate the bearing of Bergson's tem- 
poralism on the empiricism of James is far more 
difficult. The influence of the "new realism" 
is yet to come; that of Bergson is at its height. 
Where the "new realism" is exceedingly recent, 
with very few pronouncements, all subsequent 
to the exposition of radical empiricism, the 
philosophy of Bergson has been receiving con- 
stant and systematic explication for more than 
a score of years. The similarities and differ- 
ences between the new realism and radical 
empiricism are distinct and stand sharply 
defined: those between the latter and Berg- 
sonian temporalism seem vague and confused 
and stand in need of explication. James and 
Bergson both perceive reality as flux; but are 
they in agreement concerning the detail of its 
movement and operation? They both enter- 
tain an "instrumental theory of knowledge"; 



38 William James and Henri Bergson 

they are both anti-intellectualistic and com- 
mitted to evolutionism; but are these agree- 
ments more than agreements in tendency, in 
general directions of thought, or genuine agree- 
ment in concrete detail, perception for per- 
ception and opinion for opinion? Is James 
a Bergsonian and Bergson a Jamesian in method, 
in epistemology, in metaphysics? Is there 
unanimity on those ultimate topics of the 
nature of truth, the one and the many, freedom 
and chance, the character of mind and of mat- 
ter and the relation between them, the nature 
and existence of God, the origin and destiny 
of man? 

What, in a word, is the metaphysical insight 
and theory of life of each of these thinkers, 
and what is the relation of one to the other? 
Of priority there can be no question. 1 The 
series of investigations which culminated in 
the great Principles of Psychology were regis- 
tered between 1874 and 1890 in various 
articles and reviews published in periodicals 

1 Cf. G. T. Sandeau, "Nouvelles modes en philosophic, " 
Journal des debats (February 16, 1907); A. Chaumieux, " William 
James," Revue des deux mondes (October 15, 1910). 



J antes, Bergson, and "New Realism" 39 

American and foreign. In the years 1884 
appeared in Mind 1 the two articles embodying 
those doctrines which are most distinctive of 
James's psychological teaching and meta- 
physical outlook — the conception of thought 
as a stream, in which relations are as imme- 
diate data of perception as terms, and the 
conception of emotion as organic sensation. 
In his first book, published in 1889, M. 
Bergson cites the latter article. 2 Of the 
former, entitled "Some Omissions of Intro- 
spective Psychology," on the other hand, he 
categorically denies having had any knowl- 
edge. 3 Until the publication of Matiere et 
memoire, it would seem, the two thinkers 
developed their philosophies independently, 
and their unanimity, in so far as they are 
unanimous, is perhaps better to be attributed 
to the data they studied than to reciprocal 
influencing. But James's discovery of these 
data indisputably antedated Bergson's by 
some years. 

1 IX, 1-26, 188-205. 2 Time and Freewill, p. 29. 

3 Revue philosophique, LX, 229, note. 



40 William James and Henri Bergson 

Are they, however, the same data? To a 
considerable extent, undeniably so. Nor is 
there anything in the utterances of James con- 
cerning Bergson's vision to indicate that he was 
unaware of the exact limits of this identity. 
These are designated first of all by the coinci- 
dence of general direction — the temporalism, the 
instrumentalism, and the anti-intellectualism. 
In the second place, they include substan- 
tial agreement concerning the function of 
concepts. And finally they define the great 
pragmatist's acknowledgment of Bergson's 
service in providing him with cogent and 
acceptable grounds for entertaining a view he 
had long felt himself driven toward but could 
not " logically" accept. This view relates to 
the " compounding of consciousness. " In his 
A Pluralistic Universe, William James had 
insisted that 

the higher thoughts .... are psychic units, not 
compounds; but for all that, they may know together 
as a collective multitude the very same objects which 
under other conditions are known separately by as 
many simple thoughts. 1 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, chap, v, 189. 



J 'antes , Bergson, and "New Realism," 41 

In a note, he adds: 

I hold to it still as the best description of an enor- 
mous number of our higher fields of consciousness. 
They demonstrably do not contain the lower states 
that know the same objects. Of other fields, however, 
this is not so true; so in the Psychological Review for 
1895, Vol. II, p. 105 (see especially pp. 119-20), I 
frankly withdrew, in principle, my former objection 
to talking of fields of consciousness being made of 
simpler "parts," leaving the facts to decide the ques- 
tion in each special case. 1 

The facts, then, were the driving force 
against logical bias. 

I found myself compelled to give up logic, fairly, 
squarely, irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in 
human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically 
acquainted with the essential nature of reality .... 
so I prefer bluntly to call reality if not irrational 
then at least non-rational in its constitution — and by 
reality here I mean reality where things happen, all 
temporal reality without exception. I find myself no 
good warrant for even suspecting the existence of 
any reality of a higher denomination than that dis- 
tributed and strung along and flowing sort of reality 
we finite beings swim in. That is the sort of reality 
given us, and that is the sort with which logic is so 
incommensurable. 2 

1 Ibid., p. 338. 

3 Ibid., pp. 212-13. 



42 William James and Henri Bergs on 

But: 

I have now to confess .... that I should not now 
be emancipated, not now subordinate logic with so 
very light a heart, or throw it out of the deeper regions 
of philosophy to take its rightful and respectable place 
in the world of simple human practice, if I had not 
been influenced by a comparatively young and very 
original French writer, Professor Henri Bergson. 
Reading his works is what has made me bold. If I had 
not read Bergson, I should probably still be blackening 
endless pages of paper privately, in the hope of making 
ends meet that were never meant to meet, and trying 
to discover some mode of conceiving the behavior of 
reality which should leave no discrepancy between 
it and the accepted laws of the logic of identity. It is 
certain, at any rate, that without the confidence which 
being able to lean on Bergson's authority gives me 
I should never have ventured to urge these particular 
views of mine upon this ultra-critical audience. 

I must, therefore, in order to make my own views 
more intelligible, give some preliminary, account of the 
Bergsonian philosophy. But . . . . I must confine 
myself only to the features that are essential to the 
present purpose, and not entangle you with collateral 
details, however interesting otherwise. For our present 
purpose, then, the essential contribution of Bergson to 
philosophy is his criticism of intellectualism. 1 

The effect of Bergson, we may observe, was 
on the one hand to confirm William James in 

1 Op. cit.j pp. 214-15. The italics are mine. 



James, Bergson, and "Neiv Realism" 43 

his opinions concerning the alogical nature of 
reality and on the other to supply him with 
an authoritative criticism of intellectualism, to 
supplement his own, which, cogent enough to 
most of his friends and pupils, seemed to him 
insufficient. With respect to these general 
propositions, and to these only, may James 
be said to hold the Bergsonian philosophy, 
and with respect to these Bergson is as much 
a Jamesian as James a Bergsonian. These 
express a unanimity of tendency, not of con- 
crete vision, and the discussion of Bergson in 
A Pluralistic Universe shows beyond the shadow 
of a doubt that James is concerned with Berg- 
son only with respect to this tendency, going, 
in re of the particulars of insight, his own way. 

I have to confess [he writes] that Bergson's origi- 
nality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle me 
entirely. I doubt whether any one understands him 
all over, so to speak; and I am sure that he would 
himself be the first to see that this must be, and to 
confess that things which he himself has not yet 
thought out clearly had yet to be mentioned and have 
a tentative place assigned them in his philosophy. 1 

1 Ibid., p. 226. 



44 William James and Henri Bergson 

And throughout the chapter, wherever Berg- 
son's critique of intellectualism implies more 
than a mere designation of the flowing reality 
which intellect fails to envisage, the description 
of that reality is James's, not Bergson's. 
Thus, James writes of time, for example: 

If a bottle had to be emptied by an infinite number 
of successive decrements, it is mathematically impos- 
sible that the emptying should ever terminate. In 
point of fact, however, bottles and coffee-pots empty 
themselves by a finite number of decrements, each 
of definite amount. Either a whole drop emerges or 
nothing emerges from the spout. If all change went 
thus drop-wise, so to speak, if real time sprouted or 
grew by units of duration of determinate amount, just 
as our perceptions of it grow by pulses, there would 
be no Zenonian paradoxes or Kantian antinomies to 
trouble us Time itself comes in drops. 1 

If its analysis by the conceptualization of the 
identity logic leads to paradoxes, all thinkers 
save Bergson persist that the remedy for the 
failure of this logic is more of the same. Berg- 
son " alone denies that mere conceptual logic 
can tell us what is impossible or possible in the 
world of being or fact": 2 

1 Op, cit., p. 231. 2 Ibid., p. 243. 



James, Bergson, and "New Realism" 45 

When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and 
exclude everything but what we have fixed. A con- 
cept means a that-and-no-other. Conceptually time 
excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other; 
approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence; 
unity excludes plurality; independence excludes 
relativity; "mine" excludes "yours"; this connexion 
excludes that connexion — and so on indefinitely; 
whereas in the real concrete sensible flux of life expe- 
riences compenetrate each other so that it is not easy 
to know just what is excluded and what not. Past 
and future, for example, conceptually separated by 
the cut to which we give the name of present, and 
defined as being the opposite sides of that cut, are to 
some extent, however brief, co-present with each other 
throughout experience. The literally present moment 
is a verbal supposition, not a position; the only present 
ever realized concretely being the "passing moment" 
in which the dying rearward of time and its dawning 
future forever mix their lights. Say "now" and it 
was even while you say it. 1 

This looks back, be it noted, to the " specious 
present" of the Principles of Psychology, not to 
the duree reelle of the Donnees immediates. It 
is not conceivable that, if James had been inter- 
ested in, or had desired to identify himself with, 
more than the positive anti-intellectualism and 

t Ibid. i pp. 253-54. 



46 William James and Henri Bergson 

the general temporalis tic tendency which Berg- 
son exemplified, he would not have paid more 
attention to the positive and constructive 
doctrines of Bergson. But these, we have his 
own word for it, baffled him, and seemed 
obscure. The one thing that did stand out 
clearly was the critique of the concept, and the 
effect of that critique was to reassure James 
that the road he himself was on was the right 
one. Similarly Bergson recognizes the exist- 
ence in James's philosophy of certain contents 
to which he takes exception. In his introduc- 
tion to the French version of Pragmatism, he 
writes, after a very sympathetic and illumi- 
nating, though, I think, not a very correct, 
account of James's general metaphysical posi- 
tion, " certain objections can be offered against 
it [the pragmatic theory of reality] and we our- 
selves make certain reservations with respect 
to it." 

James and Bergson are at one, then, in their 
repudiation of intellectualism, in their general 
temporalism. Are they similarly at one other- 
wise ? No one that has written of the two men 



James, Bergs on, and "New Realism" 47 

but has failed to deny it. M. Menard in 
his painstaking and sympathetic summary of 
James's Principles of Psychology finds profound 
differences in matters psychological; Mr. 
Pitkin, 1 M. Boutroux, 2 M. Flournoy, 3 each finds 
significant differences of varying degrees and 
directions. Bergson, according to Mr. Pitkin, 
goes the way of the older cosmologists. He 
repudiates psycho-physics, and refers the mental 
stream, born of the collision of the elan vital 
with matter, to the underlying purity of both 
of these, a purity as such unknowable. James 
is closer to Fechner than to Bergson, in Mr. 
Pitkin's view. For James, experience is all, 
each piece of it hanging to the other by its 
edges, and the whole, self-containing, hanging 
on nothing. Where Bergson desiderates un- 
knowably pure metaphysical substrata, James 
requires only directly experienced objects. 
For Bergson, life transcends experience, for 

1 " James or Bergson or Who Is against Intellect," Journal 
of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, VII, 9, 
p. 225. 

2 William James. 

3 La philosophic de William James, Saint Blaise, 191 1. 



48 William James and Henri Bergson 

James, experience transcends concepts, and 
not life but experience is the last word of 
metaphysics. 

M. Boutroux finds that Bergson and James 
agree that life is prior to intellect, which is for 
Bergson a secondary formation developed by 
the exigencies of adaptation to a spatial world. 
Bergson thus attains from another point of 
view, and in the interest of other problems, a 
view analogous to James's. But the two views 
do not coalesce. For Bergson, "if intellect 
distorts reality as immediately given, it does 
so in the interests of practice. For James, if 
intellectual knowledge is inadequate, it is so 
because, adapted to the conditions of practice 
of a purely material sort, it is unpropitious to 
pure practice, which is the direct action of 
soul on soul." Besides, intellect is secondary, 
according to Bergson, because it contains ele- 
ments that seem to be foreign to the purely 
intuitive data of consciousness, which is nothing 
but duration as such disentangled and ab- 
stracted from both time and space. "For 
James it is the richness and complexity, not 



J antes, B ergs on y and "New Realism" 49 

the abstractions of experience which measure 
its authenticity. "* 

But M. Flournoy goes farthest of all in his 
description of the differences between the 
American thinker and the French: 

It is not clear [he writes] how [James] without abso- 
lutely reversing himself, could have been able to accept 
the vigorously monistic conception implied in the elan 
vital originel whence M. Bergson gets the whole uni- 
verse by divergent evolution. Nothing can be more 
opposed than such a vision of things to that which 
James has always had of the universe: a primordial 
chaos without a trace of unity, or order, or harmony, 
or law; pure assemblage of separate and independent 
principles or entities, the upshot of whose chance rela- 
tions is the organization of a world of growing harmony 

and union, never, perhaps, to be completed 

This world is just the opposite of the Bergsonian uni- 
verse, which, starting with an original, harmonious 
unity, developed by way of a diversifying evolution 
toward a continually greater dispersion. It would be 
difficult, then, to conceive two more contrary visions 
of the course of events than those of James and Berg- 
son, once we abstract from their common conviction 
.... that the reality of becoming, the incessant crea- 
tion of novelty, is inconceivable to our intellect and must 
be apprehended directly in the living experience itself. 2 

1 P. 90. 
'La philosophic de William James, pp. 184-86. 



50 William James and Henri Bergson 

All these enunciations exhibit facets of fact. 
Altogether the Bergsonian philosophy actually 
bears the same relation to radical empiricism 
as does the "new realism." It, too, we shall 
see, has a dominant compensatory strain. 
Though it apparently inverts the ancient vision 
soaring to eternal things, it is no less a recon- 
struction of experience for the sake of desider- 
ated values. Modern life is more awake to 
action than to peace; the will attains to things 
the intellect cannot foresee. The spontaneity 
of action, hence the certainty of attainment, 
have become dominant desiderates for our 
own age. To take the free and enduring move- 
ment discoverable in our inner life, to erect it 
into the metaphysical substrate of all being, to 
distinguish the residuum as mere appearance 
against the invincible reality of this, thereby 
unifying the world, giving a weighted warrant 
to the hoped-for impotence of death and to the 
"freedom" of man, is to voice the common 
desire. This Bergson does. His so doing is 
no less than the erection into a metaphysic, 
by developing its implications, of one of the 



James, Bergs on, and "New Realism," 51 

data which radical empiricism freshly dis- 
covered and newly stressed. In method, hence, 
in the conception of truth, in the ultimate 
designation of reality — of mind, of matter, of 
the relations between them — in the conception 
of God, and of the origin and destiny of man, 
where James summarizes and describes, Berg- 
son interprets and transmutes; where James 
takes experience as it comes, Bergson first 
dialectically extricates " reality" and then 
derives appearance from it. The one is truly 
democratic in his metaphysics, the other, as 
someone has well said, goes the way of the older 
cosmologists. 

Let us now examine the detail of these 
differences. 



CHAPTER III 

THE METHOD OF INTUITION AND THE 
PRAGMATIC METHOD 



Metaphysics by its very nature excom- 
municates the daily life. " Unreal!" it pro- 
nounces the whole great teeming world we live 
in, with its so varied aspects of sunshine and 
storm and change, its struggles and reconcili- 
ations, its menace, joy, dying, and renewal, 
all that is the warp and woof of our routinal 
day, all that experience forces us to take 
account of, and makes the rock and substance 
of the human spirit. Unreal! mere shadow 
and appearance, to be resolved and dissipated 
as vapor by the sun, in the through-shining 
light of genuine reality that hides beneath, 
without enmities, without diversity, without 
struggle, whole, happy, harmonious; knowl- 
edge and power and bliss in one — one substance, 
one matter, one God; of whatever stuff, One! 

52 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 53 

This is the immemorial challenge of meta- 
physics to experience, and it is no wonder 
that experience throws back the challenge in 
the metaphysician's teeth. "Step from your 
cloister into the open street/' it tells him, 
"with its rows of abrupt buildings jutting into 
the even sky and piercing black holes in its 
milky blue; with its horrent noises from wagons 
and trams and factories; with its wayfarers so 
intent each on his private business, each so 
willing to be heedless of all else, so needful of 
heed, of dodging vehicles and persons, of shut- 
ting ears to sounds, eyes to sights, lest every 
step land him in disaster. Go out into the 
sounding street, I say, and grasp its raw, pulsing 
immediacies! Then come back and speak if 
you can your belief in your own report that all 
its compulsive turmoil is mere unreal appear- 
ance, that reality is quite another thing, the 
very prototype and paragon of your heart's 
desire! You cannot, much as you wish it! 
You are but a poetic, adventuring Quixote 
seeing windmills as giants and convicts as 
blameless heroes. Yours is the shadow- world, 



54 William James and Henri Bergs on 

not mine. What! All this moil and sweating 
of embattled men who seek livelihood at the 
hazard of life a mere mask; all these broken 
stretches of sky and earth and water a mere 
mask, and quite another thing the true face of 
reality? Come, Mr. Metaphysician, I wish 
to believe your report; it is my dearest desire. 
But how shall I know that your reality is not 
the most illusory of illusions, the appearance of 
appearance? Teach me how you know it. 
How do you know that the world of my toils and 
my sorrow wherethrough I pass side by side 
with friend and foe is mere appearance and this 
lovely world of yours the solely real? How 
do you know?" 

"I have seen," says the metaphysician. 

"You have seen," experience retorts, "but I, 
too, have seen. And my eyes are as good as 
yours and look out upon the same world. How 
comes it that you perceive one substance where 
I perceive an infinite horde of earth, air, sky, 
and water, the sun, and the abounding stars ? 
How comes it that you perceive freedom and 
eternity and harmony where I behold necessity, 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 55 

and time, and things fighting and feeding one 
upon the other ? If you be not mad or a liar, 
cause me to see what you see." 

So experience retorts to the metaphysician's 
challenge, and with its retort, raises the " prob- 
lem of knowledge," or method. This is not, 
be it observed, a problem that exists in its own 
right, but something secondary and derivative. 
It supervenes on a confrontation of assertions 
about reality. Where there is no such con- 
frontation, there is no problem of method; 
without the contradiction of experience by 
metaphysics, no " epistemology " ; without the 
ordinary disagreements of men about the data 
of the daily life, no challenge of "How do you 
know?" Reality being essentially an active 
struggle of entities for survival, the corrobo- 
rative security of method becomes an impor- 
tant affair of civilization, and technique comes 
to seem as momentous as the residuum of life. 

Nowhere is this so patent as in philosophy. 
The metaphysician is constantly affirming of 
the whole of reality all sorts of traits that 
the rest of mankind, and particularly fellow- 



56 William James and Henri Bergson 

metaphysicians, do not see in it. Consequently, 
to a philosophical description of reality there 
speedily becomes attached an account of how 
reality was discovered. The latter is the 
" epistemology " of technical philosophy and is 
the constant accompaniment of metaphysics. 
Every great metaphysical system, from Plato 
on, carries with it a theory of knowledge, which 
is all too often falsely substituted for the system. 
Modern philosophy in particular is given to 
this substitution and insists on the "priority 
of epistemology." The habit is due to Kant, 
who invented and defended the substitution. 
Kant saw the contradiction between the ration- 
alism of the Continentals and the empiricism of 
the English, between the logical architectonic 
of Leibniz and Wolff and the psychological 
analyses of Hume and Hartley. Therein he 
beheld a confrontation in which he refused to 
takes sides without further evidence. So he 
invented "epistemology," i.e., an account of 
how each side got its knowledge, to help him 
in his decision. But he did not decide in favor 
of either. He decided in favor of his "epis- 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 57 

temology." Neither the empiricist nor the 
rationalist, he held, had any means of know- 
ing what he knew. The mind can know only 
how it knows, not what it knows. Philosophy 
must give up metaphysics. 

But metaphysics continued, in spite of this 
sage conclusion. In fact, Kant himself, by 
opposing " postulates of practical reason" to 
" categories of pure reason," continued it, and 
continued it in accordance with approved 
metaphysical tradition. For when experience 
and common-sense challenge the metaphysician, 
telling him that they look upon the same world 
as he and know it in the same way, he replies, 
"No, you do not know it in the same way. 
There is another way of knowing, which is the 
true way. Yours is the way of illusion; it 
yields only appearances, only phenomena. 
Mine is the way of truth; it yields reality in its 
essence; and in no way save mine can reality 
be known." 

Now as metaphysical systems do not agree, 
one with the other, concerning the nature of 
reality, it is not to be expected that they should 



58 William James and Henri Bergs on 

agree concerning the way in which it is known. 
In effect, their metaphysical conclusions are 
prior to their epistemological premises, for 
logically it is the nature of the world that 
determines the nature of knowledge, and not 
conversely, unless knowing and being are 
identified, and then it doesn't matter which 
goes first. In such case of esse's being the same 
as percipi, the metaphysical conclusion that is 
intended (for example, Berkeley's God) must 
itself be percipi (else it could not be an object 
of demonstration), and so the conclusion still 
determines the premise. The argument from 
the way-of-knowing to the thing-known is a 
circular argument, as M. Bergson observes, 1 
and the way of knowing is colored by the quality 
of what it knows. According to rationalistic 
metaphysics, reality is to be apprehended by 
reason, and the ordinary modes of thought and 
perception are condemned as deficient reason 
or as unreason. Voluntarism and sentimetal- 
ism supersede reason by will and emotion in 
supersessions such as Pascal's " reasons of the 

1 Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 186-93. 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 59 

heart," so superior to the mind's reason; or 
as Schelling's incidence of ideal and real in 
intellectual intuition. Materialism and sensa- 
tionalism, when they have another way of 
knowing at all, similarly reduce the way to the 
thing known, as do the Epicureans and the 
Stoics. And so on. Abstract the specific 
metaphysical coloring from the specific episte- 
mology which reveals reality, as opposed to 
that which reveals appearance, and you find 
that all epistemologies agree in identifying the 
knowing with what is known. 

Materialistic and sensationalistic philosophies 
do this less obviously than the non-material- 
istic and rationalistic ones, but still do it none 
the less. The great tradition of this distinction 
belongs, however, to the spiritualistic and the 
absolutist systems. However wide their diver- 
sity otherwise, their unanimity with regard to 
this matter is as startling as it is significant. 

Consider first the system of Plato. To him, 
more than to any other, the compensatory 
tradition of philosophy owes its method and 
authority. To him it owes its foremost keen 



60 William James and Henri Bergson 

vision of the dread philosophic abyss between 
reality and appearance, to him its first percep- 
tion of the contrast between the inadequacies 
and failures of experience and the perfection 
and excellence of the world of ideas. Yes, there 
are ideas, excellent, supreme, eternal, and per- 
fect, the prototypes of all that changes and 
moves on earth. But how shall the mind of 
man know these, how attain in his imper- 
fections to their perfection, in his mortality 
to their immortality, in his transiency to their 
eternity? What do sense or perception or 
even dialectic reveal, more than the flux of the 
daily life, in its reason and unreason ? Nothing : 
they cannot discover the Ideas. But if they 
cannot, love can. And what is love but the 
yearning of a fallen and imperfect thing for its 
lost perfection? What is knowledge but a 
procession through love back to the heavenly 
estate of the Ideas whence the mind fell? 
Nay, the mind is not mortal, it is immortal. 
Soon or late it recalls in this earthly life the 
heavenly majesty it fell from, it yearns to it 
from object to object, until, finally, it throws 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 61 

off its mortality and resumes its immortality. 
It becomes again, on earth at rare moments, 
in heaven eternally, one and the same with 
the eternal realities it at other times only 
conceived. 

That Aristotle should agree with Plato is as 
much to be expected as that he should natural- 
ize the view he participates in. For where 
Plato is rationalistic, Aristotle is empirical; 
where Plato is mystic, Aristotle is rational. 
Such is not, however, the case with respect to 
this part of epistemology. Here Aristotle and 
Plato are at one. Distinguishing, as his meta- 
physic does, between matter and form; describ- 
ing the world as a teleologic progression from 
the purity of the one to the purity of the other, 
each in its purity being transcendent to the 
world; this metaphysic finds that the ordinary 
means of knowing (which are sensation and 
thought) can apprehend no more than the inter- 
mediacy and mixture that bridges these purities ; 
that they are attached to the body and cul- 
minate in death; that they are incapable of 
grasping the purities of matter and form as such. 



62 William James and Henri Bergson 

Do these purities, then, lie beyond man's grasp ? 
Matter, indeed, does, being purely a priva- 
tive thing. But for form, which is active, 
generative, pure purpose, the mind has a 
faculty. This is the " active intellect," the 
vovs ttoltjtikos, bound to no physical organ, 
the one part of us which is immortal, 
immaterial, eternal; giving life to all else; 
actual being whose substance is that of 
the pure form of God; whose possession 
is self-possession; whose knowledge is self- 
knowledge. For in the active intellect, thinker 
and thought, knower and known, are one and 
the same. 

The identification is still more vivid and 
lucid in Plotinos. He is worth while dwelling 
on, for between him and Bergson there exist 
very striking resemblances, the more signifi- 
cant for the apparent diametricity of the oppo- 
sition of their views. For Plotinos followed, 
of course, the Platonic tradition, and to its 
bitter logical end. What the pursuit comes 
upon, as the Reality of realities, beside which 
the ideas of Plato, the forms of Aristotle, are 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 63 

mere appearance, is the One. Everywhere 
and nowhere the One is; 1 everywhere as the 
cause of all things, nowhere as their Other, 
their Different. Its supremacy lies not in 
magnitude, for magnitude is beneath it; its 
supremacy is potency, self-sufficiency, self- 
contained and unr effective. "That alone 
neither knows, nor has what it does not know, 
but being One present to itself needs not 
thought of itself/' 2 It is all beings because all 
emanate from it and it generates the thought 
that is no other than being. To behold it is 
"intellectual love," a love infinite, the sole 
true way of knowing. For even as there is a 
progression between the one and the many, a 
falling- away from the fulness of Being, so there 
is a progression of knowledge, a re-ascension 
unto this fulness, over sense first, then over 
opinion, over discursive reason, over dialectic, 
finally over that intuitive knowledge of the 
"intelligible essence" which is the God of 
Aristotle, until at last the soul has attained to 

1 Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 171-72. 
3 Cf. Enn. vi. 



64 William James and Henri Bergson 

" intellectual love." 1 For the One transcends 
cognition, even in Aristotle's intuitive way. 
Such cognition is still relative, and the One 
is absolute. To behold it is to be it, unreflect- 
ively. The vision of the One dawns upon the 
soul and absorbs it, a thing beyond utterance, 
" ineffable." 2 Subject of language, language 
can express; and not it alone, but the matters 
of immediate experience and of intellect. 
Hence, these can only lead the soul to its 
vision of the great Subject, to the fulness of the 
ineffable Unity wherein seer and seen are one 
and indivisible and nothing remains to utter. 

It is a similar thing that Dante indicates 
in his supreme statement of that high Thomian 
beatitude, the visio divinae essentiae, 3 so un- 
utterable, and so fecund a source of the 
mediaeval dialectic of Eckhardt, of Bernard, 
and of the less sophisticated utterances of 
Boehme. 

1 Cf. Bergson, Introduction a la metaphysique. 

2 Cf. H. M. Sheffer, "Ineffable Philosophies," Journal of 
Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, VI, 5, p. 123. 

3 Cf. also X. Moisant, "Dieu dans la philosophie de M. Berg- 
son," Revue de philosophie, VI (1905). 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 65 

.... My sight, becoming purified, now more and 
more was entering through the ray of the deep light 
which of itself is true. From this moment my vision 
was more potent than our discourse, which faileth 
before such seeing; and memory faileth before so great 
violence. As is he, who dreaming, seeth, and when the 
dream has vanished there remains only the passion's 
stamp, and no thing else cometh to mind again, even 
such am I. For almost wholly faileth me my vision, 
yet doth the sweetness that was born of it still drip 
within my heart. So doth the snow unstamp itself 
unto the sun. So the oracles of the Sybil lost them- 
selves in light leaves unto the wind I remember 

that I was the bolder so well to sustain it, as to have 
united my gazing with the Infinite Worth! O grace 
abounding, wherein I presumed to fix my look on the 
eternal light so long that I consumed my sight thereon. 



Here, as earlier, there is an elimination of differ- 
ences; the realm of grace is attained by a vision 
and deification, in an ecstasy wherein, as St. 
Bernard says, the individual is merged in the 
divine eternal essence "as a drop of water in a 
cask of wine." 

The aspects in which the amor intellectus dei 
of Spinoza differs from this constitute an almost 
corporate identity with the characteristics of 

1 Paradiso, xxxiii, 52-84. 



66 William James and Henri Bergson 

Bergsonian intuition. God and substance, 
Nature, the One, the All, these are but names, 
according to Spinoza, for the interpenetrating 
identity of infinite attributes or qualities, each 
infinitely vast. Of these, two are known to 
man, the extension of matter, the intension of 
thought. Less than the whole, they are mere 
appearance, bare phenomena; yet because they 
are flesh of its flesh and blood of its blood, they 
are true expressions of it, in so far forth. But 
not in their immediacy, nor in their character 
as knowledge in sensation, in perception, in 
imagination. As such they give rise to ideas 
which are unclear, indistinct, inadequate; 
ideas by nature the essence of error and know- 
ers of mere appearance. The One is to be 
known and possessed in another way, the way 
of adequacy. Therein the order of perception 
and the order of reality are one and the same. 
The whole world is perceived genetically, things 
in their essence and with their causes; and per- 
ceived in one free act. Our power to perceive 
is our virtue, our virtue is but our effort to 
preserve our selfhood, our selfhood is Divinity. 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 67 

In the recognition of our essential identity with 
God lies our happiness and our immortality. 
Now this recognition comes in intuition. It 
is " the intellectual love of God " ; it is the death 
of the difference between God and soul, sub- 
stance and mode, man and nature. It is the 
point in which the boundless universe is 
gathered up; all interpenetrates and is one. 
We see God because we are God, and our love 
toward him is no other than his love toward 
himself. In his humanity, then, man con- 
centrates and realizes the boundless energy of 
creative nature (natura naturans) and estab- 
lishes his being forever. 

II 

Few systems could be more essentially vari- 
ous in their background, outlook, and approach 
than those here reviewed. The moralism of 
Plato and Aristotle, the mystic transcendental- 
ism of Plotinos, the salvational supernaturalism 
of the mediaevals, and the confident naturalism 
of Spinoza, all these express tendencies inwardly 
diverse in both origin and quality. Yet their 



68 William James and Henri Bergson 

outcome, with respect to the way of knowing 
metaphysical reality, whatever character that 
has, is startlingly the same. Call it "intui- 
tion," "intellectual love of God," "beatitude," 
"intellectual sympathy," what you will. Be- 
side it all other modes of knowing are false 
and relative. It alone is true and absolute. 
Yet it depends upon them and cannot be 
without them. From sensation to dialectic, 
those modes constitute the stages that of 
necessity lead to it. If it supersedes them, 
it also presupposes them. In each case it 
consists essentially in the identification of the 
knower with the thing known. 

Such an identification, related to other 
forms of knowing in the historic fashion, is also 
the method of Bergson. With respect to the 
knowing of metaphysical reality, Bergson be- 
longs to the philosophic tradition. For him 
also there is a true way and a false way of 
knowing, a way absolute and a relative way. 
For him also truth is a thing primary and ulti- 
mate, not a thing derivative and functional. 
But whereas, in the tradition of metaphysics, 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 69 

epistemology argues in a circle, unaware, from 
the thing to be known to the mode of knowing, 
Bergson does so knowingly and with intention. 1 
Metaphysical reality, he teaches, is life in its 
onrush, pure duration. Whatever is unvital, 
static, motionless, is appearance, an inversion 
of the real. Now the independent episte- 
mological tradition, particularly in the work 
of its founder, Kant, is concerned alone with 
this inversion. Kant presumes the unity and 
universality of the scientific method. But 
science turns on laws, on relations, and a rela- 
tion is nothing apart from the intellect which 
relates. Science must assume therefore in its 
totality a merely "relative and human char- 
acter." This it does under the Kantian treat- 
ment — and must — for Kant completely misses 
the fact that science becomes more and more 
symbolical as it passes "from the physical to 
the vital, from the vital to the psychical." To 
him all experience is one and is the experience 
which our intellect constructs. All this, Berg- 
son thinks, is based on the fundamentally false 

1 Cf. Creative Evolution, trans, by Mitchell, pp. 178 ff. 



70 William James and Henri Bergson 

assumption that the vital can be apprehended 
intellectually, that life in its proper direction 
can be perceived by its inversion. God and 
freedom and perhaps immortality, which are 
beyond demonstration by the intellect and its 
constructions, may be, hence, quite within the 
grasp of the other way of knowing. 1 This other 
way of knowing is intuition, not postulation of 
the practical reason. Bergson, it is to be 
observed, is bolder than Kant and goes the 
way of the older metaphysics. He reconverts 
the postulate into the dogma. 

By " intuition" Bergson designates "that 
kind of intellectual sympathy by which one 
sets oneself in the interior of an object in order 
to coincide with the very reality of that object, 
with its uniqueness, with that in it, conse- 
quently, which cannot be expressed." 2 The 
knowledge so attained is absolute, inasmuch 
as mind and object coincide. In this coinci- 
dence the "point of view" disappears. The 

1 Cf. op. cit., pp. 356-63. 

2 "Introduction a la metaphysique," Revue de metaphysique et 
morale (1903). 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 71 

whole object is apprehended at once, in its 
innermost reality, its perfection, its infinity, 
its simplicity. Symbolize, analyze, and you 
shatter this simple intuition; absolute knowl- 
edge gives way to relative knowledge; " points 
of view" become important. All you attain 
with your symbols and analyses, however, is 
merely the bringing to terms of the unknown 
with the known, the generation of an infinite 
collection of predicates that are intended to 
bring back a unique and simple subject, and 
that can never, never attain this original unique 
unity of interpenetrating qualities in which 
each is all and all are each. Predicates are 
images, or concepts, and neither can represent 
this heterogeneous unity. It transcends repre- 
sentation: to know it you must become it. 
But science is representation, an arrangement 
of conceptual notes, which, however cleverly 
taken, cannot reproduce their subject-matter. 
Reality therefore transcends also science. 
Science is not really empirical. "A true 
empiricism is one that sets itself the task of 
getting as close as possible to the original itself, 



72 William James and Henri Bergs on 

of sounding the depths of its life, of feeling the 
pulses of its spirit by a sort of intellectual 
auscultation. Such an empiricism is the true 
metaphysics." 1 

What is this auscultation intellectuelle ? It 
is the supersession, in the Plotinian way, of 
dialectic, of science, of all conceptual knowledge, 
by intuition. Concepts and analyses are born 
of our insufficiency. We piece out and extend 
our senses and consciousness with activities no 
longer perceptive, " activities of abstraction, 
generalization, and reasoning." These activi- 
ties are not creative but ordinative, ignoring 
more than they handle, and contradicting each 
other continually. But suppose now that in- 
stead of seeking to transcend perception, we 
sink ourselves in it, developing and expanding 
it. " Suppose we set our will in it, and this will, 
dilating, dilates our vision of reality. Like the 
artist, then, we shall have subordinated our 
faculty of doing to our faculty of knowing. 2 " 
The exigencies of life require us to act, to con- 

1 Op. ciL, p. 14. 

2 La perception du changement, p. 13. 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 73 

ceptualize, to reason. The concepts we attain 
to go in couples are contradictory. Neither 
one nor both can lead back to the intuition 
from which practical necessity draws them, 
though that intuition can make clear how both 
spring from it. Each concept is only a practi- 
cal question that our activity puts to reality, 
and that the latter replies to with yes or no, 
thus permitting the very essence of this reality 
to escape. To get to that, the mind must 
practice an inversion, an inversion in analysis 
itself. Modern mathematics does so when 
it substitutes the making for the made and 
aims at recovering the generative conceptions 
of magnitude. Science does so when it makes 
use of ideas " where clearness is at bottom 
nothing more than the once attained assurance 
of their profitable manipulation, where truth 
and fertility are so many encounters with real- 
ity that do not necessarily converge toward one 
centre." 2 With these concepts a long famili- 
arity is needful. "It is impossible to have an 
intuition of reality, that is, an intellectual 

'-Introduction a la metaphysique, p. 34. 



74 William James and Henri Bergson 

sympathy with its innermost nature unless its 
confidence has been won by long comradeship 
with its external manifestations." Once won, 
these manifestations will integrate in intuition, 
and yield the reality that underlies. The 
object of metaphysics is by their means "to 
effect (operer) qualitative differentiations and 
integrations." So, however, metaphysics pre- 
supposes science and continues it, although 
superseding it. For metaphysics is a universal 
science, and science too often but a relative and 
symbolic knowledge, in terms of pre-existing 
concepts which aim to pass from the static 
to the dynamic. Whereas metaphysics must 
needs be that "intuitive knowledge which in- 
stalls itself in movement as such and adopts 
the very life of things." In this installation, 
which is intuition, science and philosophy 
unite, and the latter continues and fulfils no 
less than it supersedes the former. 

Still more explicitly Plotinian is the account 
of the relation between science and intuition 
which Bergson gives in Creative Evolution. 
Since, for him, epistemology and metaphysics 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 75 

reciprocally imply each other, a theory of reality 
is at one and the same time a theory of knowl- 
edge, a theory of life, a theory of instinct, and 
of intellect. Evolutionally, hence, intuition 
attaches itself to instinct, analysis to intellect. 
Instinct is synthetic and knows a much-at- 
once; intellect is analytic and knows one con- 
cept. Instinct is knowledge of the substance of 
reality; intellect only of its form. But because 
instinct is knowledge of substance, it is limited 
in its scope; and because intellect is knowledge 
of form, it is confined only to appearances. 
The one, by itself, is non-speculative, the other 
volatile. Hence " there are things that intelli- 
gence alone is able to seek, but which left to it- 
self it will never find. These things instinct 
alone could find; but it will never seek them." 1 
It follows that neither intellect nor instinct can 
by itself alone be the philosophical way of 
knowing. " Philosophy," says Bergson, almost 
in the words of Plotinos, "can only be an effort 
to dissolve again into the Whole." 2 The whole 
of reality can be known only by the whole of 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 151. 2 Ibid., p. 191. 



76 William James and Henri Bergs on 

mind. Now the whole of mind is intuition, and 
intuition is instinct and intellect, " instinct that 
has become disinterested, self-conscious, ca- 
pable of reflecting upon its object and enlarging 
it indefinitely." 1 Instinct is sympathy, and 
instinct, so changed, is intellectual sympathy. 
It is then identical with the very substance 
and flow of reality itself. The two diverse 
and opposed movements of the mind have, in 
it, been dissolved and united into their original 
durative force and are one with each other and 
with the whole metaphysical onrush, with that 
which is pure duration, consciousness, life. 
Thus philosophy follows science. It super- 
poses upon the latter's analytic and symbolic 
knowledge another kind. It reintegrates our 
scientific formulae into " absolute knowledge," 
and "in the absolute we live and move and 
have our being." This absolute knowledge 
"is reality itself, in the profoundest meaning 
of the word, that we reach by the combined 
and progressive development of science and 
philosophy." But this is very different from 

1 Op. cit., p. 176. 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 77 

a synthesis of the material or intellectual or 
scientific knowledge which is the means of 
attaining it. It is an experience integral, but 
it is not a generalization of experience; it is 
absolutely non-discursive and unthinking, for 
like the Plotinian intuition of the One, it dis- 
solves discourse into its dynamic origins and 
transmutes thought into transcendental feeling. 
This knowledge-and-reality admits of de- 
grees, from the absolute coincidence of the self 
with itself, to matter, in which there is the 
minimum of duration. 

Install yourself in duration by means of intuition, 
and you "have first of all the feeling of a very specific 
tension, whose very specificity appears like a choice 
from among an infinity of possible durations. You 
perceive present as many durations as you will, all very 
different from one another, although each of them, 
reduced to concepts, i.e., envisaged from without from 
opposite points of view, leads always back to the same 
indefinable combination of the many and the one. 1 

Now in real time we do not logically need to 
suppose any real duration other than our own, 
just as there might not exist any other color 

1 Introduction d la metaphysiqne, pp. 23 ff. 



78 William James and Henri Bergs on 

than orange. But even as intuition feels in 
orange a tendency to red and to yellow, pro- 
longed perhaps in the whole spectrum between 
these two, so our intuition of our own duration 
brings us into contact with a continuity of 
durations which we should follow, whether up 
or down; in both cases we may expand indefi- 
nitely by a more and more violent effort; in 
both cases we may transcend ourselves. Going 
downward we subdivide, spatialize, till we 
pass from quality to quantity; finally reaching 
pure repetition. By pure repetition mate- 
riality is defined. In the upward direction 
duration grows, its limit being eternity. 

Not conceptual eternity, .... but a living and 
ever-moving eternity, where we find our own duration 
as vibrations are found in light, 1 which is the concretion 
of all durations just as matter is its deglutition. Intui- 
tion moves between these two extreme limits and this 
movement is metaphysics itself. 

To become metaphysical, Bergson tells us, 
the mind must cease to be practical. For him, 
as for historical philosophy, action is the enemy 
of vision; the faculty of speculation, the artist's 

1 The favorite simile of Plotinos. 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 79 

faculty which perceives reality in its go, is 
independent of that of action and may be 
detached from it; the intuition of reality is, 
indeed, the antithesis of its control. Control 
is needful and utility arises only when there 
is an other, a something not ourselves, that 
may make for righteousness but does not make 
for peace. Intelligence and analysis are the 
method and form of control. They are con- 
tingent on this other, and are, with it, hence, 
only derivative and secondary. Intuition 
abolishes otherness; in it the thinker and the 
thought are one. The spirit ceases to act and 
lets itself live. It then becomes identical with 
the universe, and the universe, it is well known, 
need adapt itself to nothing. The universe is 
absolute, its being is one and the same as its 
knowing. The knowing, hence, is absolute. 
Now, inasmuch as the procedure of the sciences 
and the arts applies always to an other, is only 
the method whereby homo faber renders the 
world more congenial to himself, that kind of 
knowing which is the substance of the arts and 
the sciences must be of a genus quite other than 



8o William James and Henri Bergson 

intuition, and can apprehend only appearance. 
In this conclusion, Bergson agrees with the phil- 
osophic tradition, from Plato to Spinoza. He 
does not agree with William James. 

He does not agree with William James 
because the latter, in pragmatism, does not aim 
to distinguish the method of philosophy from 
that science, but to extend the method of science 
to philosophy. 1 For pragmatism, the instru- 
ment in its works does not conceal reality; it 
reveals reality. For pragmatism the fallacy 
of thought lies in the hypostasis of the instru- 
ment, and not in its use; for Bergson it lies in 
use as such. The distinction is fundamental, 
for this reason: Bergson derives his episte- 
mology from his metaphysics, and is compelled 
thereby to give his epistemology an especial 
twist; pragmatism observes knowing and 
method as so many empirical data of expe- 

1 "Since philosophers are only men thinking about things 
in the most comprehensive possible way, they can use any method 
whatsoever freely. Philosophy must, in any case, complete the 
sciences and must incorporate their methods. One cannot see 
why, if such a policy should appear advisable, philosophy might 
not end by forswearing all dogmatism whatever, and become as 
hypothetical in her manner as the most empirical science of them 
all." — Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 25-26. 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 81 

rience, neither better nor worse than any of 
the others, and studies them as they occur. 

Intuition is not one of such epistemological 
occurrences. It has its basis, like all hypos- 
tases, in fact of some kind, of course; but it 
becomes what Bergson describes it to be only 
by hypostatizing this basis. The historic 
glorification of intuition is nothing more than 
a hypostasis of the instrument. A description 
of how this particular hypostasis arises will be 
at one and the same time a description of the 
difference between the pragmatic method and 
the method of intuition. 

Ill 

Pragmatism asserts that "the meaning of 
any proposition can always be brought down 
to some particular consequence in our future 
practical experience, .... the point lying 
in the fact that the experience must be par- 
ticular rather than in the fact that it must 
be active." 1 This particularity applies to 
every possible content of experience — concepts, 

1 The Meaning of Truth, p. 210. 



82 William James and Henri Bergson 

percepts, relations, time, space, mind, what you 
will — in such wise that "the parts of experience 
hold together from next to next by relations 
that are themselves parts of experience. 1 The 
directly apprehended universe needs, in short, 
no extraneous transempirical connective sup- 
port, but possesses in its own right a concate- 
nated or continuous structure." Nothing, con- 
sequently, is excluded from immediacy. Every 
item, from the most solid to the most ephem- 
eral of the daily life, with its shocks and pains 
and resistances and evil, occurs in that flow 
with all its intrinsic nature knowable. In so 
far forth, Bergson 's immediacy excludes these 
items: it is perfect and continuous and har- 
monious; James's includes every possible 
entity that the mind can think. And the 
knowledge of any such entity in its immediacy, 
James calls knowledge-of -acquaintance. 

Like intuition, this knowledge apprehends 
its object in its uniqueness, but unlike intui- 
tion, it is not an identification of self, or mind, 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 280; cf. The Will to Believe, p. 278; 
Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 16-20. 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 83 

and object. The mind terminates in the object, 
as your mind and my mind terminate in these 
words that I write and you read, but mind and 
object are not one. "All the whats as well as 
the thats of reality, relational as well as ter- 
minal, are in the end content of immediate 
concrete perception." 1 Now, if the immediate 
were actually perfect and continuous, as Berg- 
son says it is, it could never complicate itself 
into representative and conceptual knowledge; 
the mind would rest in it as the gods rest in the 
eternal ideas, or Bergson in his intuition, with- 
out seeking or desiring anything else. But 
the immediate directly compels us to like and 
to dislike. It is not throughout propitious. 
The mind flees from or seeks to destroy its 
enemies and clings to and seeks to conserve its 
friends. It prefers the continuous and the 
perfect and rejects the shocking and the evil. 
These responses to the immediate, which bear 
the same relation to it as the waves of the sea 
to the sea, give rise to what is called mediate or 
reflective knowledge, the kind of knowledge 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 342, note. 



84 William James and Henri Bergson 

which James calls knowledge-about. The prag- 
matic rule is a rigorous statement of the empiri- 
cal processes by which knowledge-about arises 
and gets reduced again to knowledge-oj -acquaint- 
ance. It explains the nature of meaning and 
the nature of truth. 

The distinction here made is a distinction 
analogous to that of Bergson's between intui- 
tive and conceptual knowledge. But for Berg- 
son this distinction is one of kind; for James it 
is one of degree. Knowledge-about is not the 
inversion or opposite of knowledge-of-acquaint- 
ance. It is the complication of such knowledge 
as a wave is the special complication of the sea. 
Knowledge-of -acquaintance became knowledge- 
about by way of addition, not by way of sub- 
traction or opposition, and its cognitive utility 
is absolutely contingent on its retaining its 
status in immediacy. What are the reasons 
for this ? 

The first is, that unless any piece of knowl- 
edge-about lead to and dissolve in that which 
it is about, it is not knowledge at all, but fact. 
Now its leading or pointing is what James calls 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 85 

ambulatory, not saltatory; it proceeds by a 
" concatenated " movement from next to next, 
and every step in this movement is matter of 
direct or immediate experience. For example, 
I think, as I write, of a book in the next room, 
to which I wish to refer. My thought, as I 
now think it, is of and about the book. Of 
what does the thought consist? Of a vague 
visual image of the book's shape and color, of 
kinaesthetic tendencies in my limbs, in the 
biceps of my left hand, and in the muscles at 
the back of my neck, and of a well-defined 
feeling of direction which seems different from 
these kinaesthetic sensations but which deter- 
mines, localizes, and integrates them. They 
form a sort of hole, very specific and definite, 
in which only one thing can fit. And their 
total effect is that of a specific impulsion 
toward that thing. Of all this, and the unrest 
which accompanies it, I have immediate cogni- 
tion. It is all matter of acquaintance. Now 
suppose that I relax my attention from my 
writing. I find that I rise from the table, pass 
into the next room to the bookshelf, pick up 



86 William James and Henri Bergson 

one book, then another, then another, finally 
stop. The stopping is not a change of action 
into inaction. I do not feel inactive. I feel 
a different direction of action, an action which 
does not seem to contain any unrest. The 
book I now hold in my hand fits. It fulfils or 
satisfies the tendency. The visual image is 
gone, the particular sense of direction is gone, 
the whole has melted into the tactile and visual 
sensations of the book and the sense of poise, 
of satisfaction. No step in this movement but 
has been immediately felt in its substance and 
in its relations. And the transition from the 
first to the last step has at all points been as 
much matter of acquaintance as either termi- 
nus — a quo or ad quern. The terminus a quo, 
however, has been called knowledge-about the 
terminus ad quern, an idea of the book. What 
is it that turns this object into an idea, into a 
representation of another thing, into some- 
thing that has meaning? Empirically it is 
nothing more than the immediately felt motri- 
city, the feeling of direction, added to the visual 
and other " images." This is the particular 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 87 

element that gives meaning to objects of direct 
apprehension, that causes them to be about 
an object, between which and the mind they 
are the mean. This is the element that most 
disappears when the meaning terminates in the 
meant. The rest smoothly adds itself to, and 
is fulfilled in, the object. I pause when I get 
the right book. I can no longer distinguish 
the visual image from this book, although I did 
distinguish it from the others that I handled, 
and so on. My idea of the book has been true, 
my meaning correct, because the movement it 
initiated in the direction it took culminated in 
satisfaction. It was felt as substitutional, as 
reaching beyond itself. Without this feeling, 
which is an immediate cognition of inner tend- 
ency and direction, "idea" is just so much flat 
fact, with no meaning, unless it be said to mean 
itself. 1 

Well, having the book in hand, how do I 
know it as the book, the goal and terminus of 
the cognitive movement unrolled in time ? 
First of all, that movement is gone. Its place 

1 Cf. Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 67-90. 



88 William James and Henri Bergson 

has been taken by what can best be described 
as a glow of direct possession. There has 
occurred, at the same time, an intensification 
and enrichment of the spatial and color com- 
plexes which were the substantive parts of the 
"idea." In their paler role, they were "men- 
tal"; now I cannot distinguish them from the 
total "book" into which they seem indissolu- 
bly merged. They have not been less imme- 
diate or real than the book now is, but less 
adequate and satisfactory. If, now, I am a 
traditional metaphysician, I call them "appear- 
ance," and that fulfilment of them which I 
designate by the word "book" I call reality. 
They are "concept," that "percept"; they are 
relative, that absolute. The knowledge of 
them, furthermore, I distinguish similarly; as 
ideational, as meaning, it is merely analytic, 
conceptually relative; as meant, as satisfaction, 
it is absolute, it is coincidence of self and object 
in intuition. Empirically, however, there is 
no such dichotomy. The cognitive immedi- 
acy is the same in the whole process from begin- 
ning to end. It is the percept's retroactive 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 89 

validating power that certifies me as an actual 
knower of the book. "Our fields of expe- 
rience/' as James says, "have no more definite 
boundaries than have our fields of view. Both 
are fringed with a more that continuously 
develops and that continuously supersedes 
them as life succeeds." 1 Immediacy of every 
datum in a cognitive experience is the conditio 
sine qua non of the experience's being cognitive. 
An unexperienced meaning is not a meaning. 

In point of fact, every piece of knowledge- 
of-acquaintance becomes in its turn knowledge- 
about without thereby forfeiting its status in 
immediacy. Concept and percept are consub- 
stantial and interchangeable, differing not in 
nature but in function. Traditional meta- 
physics, however, hypostatizes the junction? 

1 Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 71. 

2 In this wise Bergson, for example, hypostatizes duration. 
Finding it, as a matter of acquaintance, directly satisfactory, and 
coupling with it the compensatory values of ''freedom" and 
" unity," he declares it knowable only intuitively and rules out 
its "conceptual" or representative use as impossible. Duration, 
his thesis runs, cannot be used instrumentally; it is always a 
meant, a cognitive terminus ad quern, never a terminus a quo. 
But pragmatism denies this. The pragmatist points out that 
any entity we experience directly can have the function of leading 



90 William James and Henri Bergson 

and, observing that the cognitive satisfaction 
resides in knowledge-of-acquaintance, dubs such 
knowledge intuition, identifies in it mind and 
object, and makes it the key to reality. 

IV 

This hypostasis has important bearing on 
the further consideration of method which is 
involved in the conception of truth. In Mat- 
ter and Memory, Bergson speaks 1 of " distin- 
guishing the point of view of customary or useful 
knowledge from that of true knowledge." And 
in his introduction to the French version of 
Pragmatism, he speaks of James as believing 
that truth is created by human imagination. 

We invent truth in order to make use of reality, 
just as we create mechanical converters for the utiliza- 
tion of natural forces. The essence of the pragmatic 

to and meaning. The perception of duration is not exempt. 
Whenever we use it as a qualifying predicate, it has that function, 
as, e.g., in "Man endures." It is futile to retort that such a use 
conceptualizes it; for if it be not a concept by its nature, use will 
not make it so, since use is additive — function to substance, so 
to speak. And, in any event, concepts are as much matters of 
acquaintance as percepts, and their cognitive use is an enrich- 
ment of their immediacy, not an abrogation thereof. 

1 P. 243. 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 91 

conception of truth might, to my mind, be summed 
up with some such formula as this: while for other 
theories a new truth is a discovery, for pragmatism 
such a truth is an invention. 1 

Although he recognizes that this analogy 
and these terms are not James's, M. Bergson 
thinks them faithful to the spirit of James's 
system, and most in harmony with his theory 
of reality, and with respect to that Bergson 
himself "would make .... certain reserva- 
tions." 2 With these reservations we shall have 
to deal in another place. It is sufficient here 
merely to mention them in order to indicate 
that if made with respect to the pragmatic 
theory of reality, analogous reservations must 
be made with respect to the pragmatic defi- 
nition of truth. What are they? Bergson 
does not say in so many words, but that they 
must needs be radical is evinced by his sharp 
contrast between "useful knowledge" and "true 
knowledge." It is of the spirit of the Berg- 
sonian philosophy that the true shall be the 
opposite of the useful, while for pragmatism 

1 Le pragmatisme, Introduction, p. n. 

2 Ibid., p. 25. 



92 William James and Henri Bergson 

the very essence of truth is utility. Utility 
abolishes insight according to Bergson; accord- 
ing to James, without utility, insight can have 
no meaning. 

The key to this contrast is the radical meta- 
physical divorce that Bergson compels between 
conceptual or discursive and intuitive knowl- 
edge. In the beginning man and nature are 
one; "in the absolute we live and move and 
have our being." But the needs of existence 
compel us to separate ourselves from the whole 
to which we belong, to view and to treat it as 
another. These views, in sensation, perception, 
and intellection, are in a different dimension 
from the reality itself. They are mere views, 
snapshots, cinematographic instants, cognitive 
cuts of something that is itself not plural but 
one, not discrete but continuous. Our views, 
hence, serve our needs, and help us to control 
the reality we view. But in this service they 
are truer to our nature than to that of reality. 
Their utility forms a thick veil between us and 
it, distorts its character, and belies its nature. 
These can be revealed only in intuition. Utility 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 93 

is vociferous, intuition is silent. Utility is 
symbolic, plural, discursive, and always rela- 
tive; intuition is identical with the object 
itself, is one, dumb, absolute, ineffable. Intui- 
tion, hence, is truth; utility, mere falsification. 
If you wish to know a thing truly, you must be 
that thing. 

Also with respect to truth, then, Bergson 
belongs to the philosophic tradition. In that 
tradition,, what is truth is a property of the 
object of belief, not of the belief. The truth 
of a belief belongs to it in virtue of a quality 
in an alien thing, and if once true, it is true 
forever. Hence, the absolute alone, or God, to 
whom all things are immediately present, who 
is thinker and thought in one, can possess truth, 
and the human mind must depend on its coin- 
cidence with this supernal mind for its own 
poor fragments and shreds of truth. The same 
essential identity of thinker and thought are 
demanded in the Bergsonian conception of 
truth. Truth is an absolute, a possession, not 
a use. It belongs to the intellect when it 
apprehends space and matter, to the soul when 



94 William James and Henri Bergson 

it apprehends movement and life. For then 
these apprehend only what they are. 

The pragmatist, coming to his investigation 
of knowledge without preconceptions and with- 
out prejudices, treating knowledge as just 
another empirical item of experience, to be 
dealt with on its own account, sees truth in 
exactly the inverse way. For the pragmatist, 
truth is what we live by, not what we rest in. 
We rest in the immediate, and, as the discussion 
of method has made clear, everything is imme- 
diate, concepts, percepts, evil, good, things, 
imaginations, realities, illusions; no item of 
experience can be an item without being imme- 
diate. If, then, we are to distinguish between 
truth and error, immediacy cannot help us, 
and intuition, we have seen, is no more than 
a designation for a particular use of satisfactory 
immediacies. Truth must be something super- 
added to the plain immediacy of any content 
of cognition. Be that content simple or com- 
plex, it becomes true when there occurs, 
together with its other qualities, one more of 
specific and recognizable nature. What is 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 95 

this one more known as? How is a content 
of experience as true different from a content 
of experience as fact? The difference lies in 
that the former works. Fact, the immediate, 
is silent; truth has a voice. Already in 1884, 
William James had pointed out this difference. 
It is the difference between "knowledge- 
of -acquaintance " and " knowledge-about." 
Knowledge-of -acquaintance is dumb, without 
being ineffable. The mind holds the thing 
it is acquainted with in a specific immediate 
feeling, the feeling of that fact in its uniqueness. 
But as such, the thing can offer no deliverance 
about anything, not even about itself. It is 
neither true nor false, but is genuinely abso- 
lute. To become true or false, it must get 
into relation; it must operate and signify. 
Suppose, e.g., 

some little feeling that gives a what. If other feelings 
should succeed which remember the first, its what may 
stand as subject or predicate of some piece of knowl- 
edge-about, of some judgment, perceiving relations 
between it and other whats which the other feelings 
may know. The hitherto dumb q [i.e., the feeling- 
content] will then receive a name and be no longer 



g6 William James and Henri Bergson 

speechless. But every name, as students of logic 
know, has its " denotation," and the denotation always 
means some reality or content, relationless ab extra 

or with its internal relations unanalyzed No 

relation-expressing proposition is possible except on 
the basis of a preliminary acquaintance with such 
"facts," with such contents as this. Let q be fra- 
grance, let it be toothache, or let it be a more complex 
kind of feeling, like that of the full moon swimming in 
her blue abyss: it must first come in that simple shape 
and be held fast in that first intention, before any 
knowledge about it can be attained. The knowledge 
about it is it with a context added. Undo it, and what 
is added cannot be context. 1 

Hence, truth, if it be a deliverance at all, 
and have articulation, must be attributed to 
the context j not to the text — that is, if by truth 
we mean what has always been meant, a quality 
of thinking, not of mere fact. As a quality of 
thinking, truth is (and error no less) that 
which turns the immediate into the mediate. 
It makes knowledge-of-acquaintance over into 
knowledge-about. And the truth or error of 
knowledge-about is identical with its prosper- 
ous or its unsuccessful workings. These work- 
ings are the concrete, immediately-experienced 

1 The Meaning of Truth, pp. 14, 15. 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 97 

transitions from the knowledge-about to that 
which the knowledge is about. They partake 
of what is for Bergson the intrinsic and under- 
lying character of reality itself, since they are 
transitions, are actions, are the very force of 
cognition. But they are cognitive not because 
they are not related. They are cognitive 
because they are related. Cognition is relation, 
even in knowledge-of-acquaintance. And so 
far as only action and transition are reality, 
relation is reality. And the cognition present 
in predication, in judgment, in every form 
of knowledge-about is true in so far as the 
relations it initiates progress harmoniously to 
their mergence in direct conjunction with the 
object of their interest. 

Use, it follows, M. Bergson to the contrary 
notwithstanding, does not veil, but reveals, 
reality. Truth is the revelation, the uncovering, 
and even the creation, of one reality by means 
of another, and it is even the identification of 
one reality with another. Truth is prosperous 
cognitive instrumentation, under any and all 
of these conditions. When, therefore, James 



98 William James and Henri Bergson 

speaks of vicious intellectualism, of the falsi- 
fying effect of concepts, of the " opposition" 
between the conceptual and the real, he does 
not mean what Bergson means. He means 
exactly the opposite thing. Bergson's pre- 
suppositions are metaphysical. He finds con- 
cepts to belong to a metaphysical order of being 
utterly different from that of reality. They are 
alien to it and are born only by aborting it; 
they express in use our needs, our practical 
interests, and all those qualities which are not 
the interests of reality. James has no such 
presuppositions. Percepts and concepts are 
"consubstantial." They are of the same, not 
of different, orders of being. They interact, 
and work on each other in a variety of ways. 
Concepts, being easier to handle, are more 
naturally the furniture and tools of intellec- 
tion than percepts. We substitute one for 
the other in use, and interchangeably. In use, 
and only so long as in this use, in the exercise 
of instrumental function, concepts and all that 
they imply are true to each other, analysis is 
valid, and falsification is impossible. Abandon 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 99 

the use, and analysis becomes inevitably falsi- 
fication. Why ? Because a functional use is 
converted into a metaphysical one; knowledge- 
about, qua about, is identified with knowledge- 
of-acquaintance; context is treated as if it were 
text. And this is falsification. It is no less an 
error than would be the action of a thirsty man 
who, having discovered that water can be made 
from hydrogen and oxygen, tries to quench his 
thirst by swallowing quantities of these gases. 
A similar activity constitutes in discourse what 
James means by vicious intellectualism and 
abstractionism. Now James enthusiastically 
agrees with Bergson that the metaphysical 
substitution of one reality for another is falsi- 
fication; 1 he does not agree that the cognitive 
substitution is such. Thus, for Bergson, hydro- 
gen and oxygen would belong to an altogether 
different metaphysical order from water; and 
consequently the cognitive use of these gases 
as knowledge-about water becomes error. For 
James, on the other hand, the liquid and the 
two gases are on the same metaphysical level; 

1 Cf. A Pluralistic Universe, chap. v. 



ioo William James and Henri Bergs on 

the cognitive use of one with respect to the 

other is quite correct, and the only error is the 

hypostatization of cognitive or functional identity 

into metaphysical identity — it is drinking 

gases instead of water. 

We conceive a concrete situation by singling out 
some salient or important feature in it, and classing it 
under that; then, instead of adding to its previous 
characters all the positive consequences which the 
new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use 
our concept privatively; we reduce the originally rich 
phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that value 
abstractly taken, treating it as a case of " nothing but" 
that concept, and acting as if all the other characters 
from which the concept is abstracted were expunged. 1 

For James, hence, falsification belongs to the 
realm of metaphysics; for Bergson, to the 
realm of cognition. And since, for both, cogni- 
tion is ordinarily understood as of utilitarian 
origin and character, utility becomes identical 
with unreality for the one and with truth for 
the other. But in point of fact, Bergson 
hypostatizes truth. He makes the confusion 
common to all critics of pragmatism and trans- 
fers the eulogium which derives from use in 

1 The Meaning of Truth, p. 249. 



Intuition and Pragmatic Methods 101 

knowledge-about, to the outcome of use, to 
knowledge-of-acquaintance. For Bergson sub- 
stitutes fact, which simply is, without either 
truth or falsehood, for knowledge which has 
one or the other of these attributes according 
to its behavior. 

For the pragmatist true knowledge is 
knowledge-a&0^. And it remains true only 
so long as it is about. Knowledge-of-acquaint- 
ance makes no deliverance. The only thing it 
reveals is itself, and when it is pretended that 
it can reveal, in its intentless and dimensionless 
immediacy, anything other than itself, that 
pretense is falsification. 1 But when an object 
of acquaintance is put to work, when it is ma- 
nipulated as a means of control of other objects 
of acquaintance, to point to them, to clear the 
way for them, to act in their place, it in so far 
forth helps to reveal them, not by masquerading 
in their shape, but by clearing out everything 
that might stand in the way (including itself) 
of their self-revelation. When it does so, it is 

1 Cf. my earlier discussion of this point "James, Bergson, and 
Mr. Pitkin," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific 
Methods, VII, 13, p. 353. 



102 William James and Henri Bergson 

true, and only then. Its behavior is then a 
harmonious transition from one piece of 
knowledge-of-acquaintance to another differ- 
ent from the first, and enriched by the transi- 
tion. Representatively "to know an object 
is .... to ... . lead to it through a con- 
text which the world supplies. To know an 
object immediately .... or intuitively is for 
mental content and object to be identical, i.e., 
for object to be apprehended without inter- 
mediaries or context." 1 And that is the whole 
story. 

1 The Meaning of Truth, pp. 46, 50. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE REVELATIONS OF INTUITION AND THE 
DISCOVERIES OF PRAGMATISM 



Since epistemology and the doctrine of 
method are inevitably circular, making use, 
in their very construction, ot exactly those 
materials of reality which are to be appre- 
hended and defined by their application, to 
discuss the theory of knowledge or method is 
to discuss its implied metaphysic, and to apply 
either or both is to apprehend the metaphysical 
soil from which they spring and the experi- 
ential atmosphere they grow in. This we saw 
in the last chapter. Intuition could be defined 
only by means of what it exhibits, the prag- 
matic method only in terms of that to which it 
applies. It is now needful to look more deeply 
into the revelations of intuition and the dis- 
coveries of pragmatism, to study in and for 
themselves their nature and inward consti- 
tution, to see clearly and distinctly their 

103 



104 William James and Henri Bergs on 

similarities and differences, and to apprehend 
the bearing of their traits on the destiny of 
man and the rule of good. 

Methodologically, no two devices could differ 
more completely than that of James and that 
of Bergson. And, in spite of a certain identity 
of spirit and direction, of sympathetic appre- 
ciation of each other, the difference shows itself 
as still more pervasive and more profound, 
metaphysically. Paradoxical as it may seem, 
Bergson is before all things systematic, con- 
sistently architectonic, a monist who insists 
on an irrefragable difference between appear- 
ance and reality; a logician who with rigorous 
dialectic deduces the character of the one from 
the nature of the other. James, on the con- 
trary, is before all things intent on insights and 
data rather than on system. His philosophy 
is a mosaic, not an architectonic. He does not 
set out from one intuition which is the womb 
and matrix of all else. For him there is every- 
where a new beginning, and the piecemeal 
character of knowledge-of-acquaintance is 
rooted in the plural character of the reality that 



Intuition and Pragmatism 105 

it apprehends. Thus, where Bergson beholds 
a universe, James sees a multiverse; where 
Bergson envisages at the most two orders, one 
in any event the derivative and inversion of the 
other, James perceives no order whatever, or 
an infinitude of orders, each the peer of the 
others. The fact is, as has been noted, that 
James is a democrat in metaphysics. Bergson, 
on the contrary, is a monarchist. For him the 
distinction between appearance and reality is 
aboriginal and final. For James it is second- 
ary and functional. From Bergson's stand- 
point, James's philosophy must be essentially 
intellectualistic; from James's, Bergson's phi- 
losophy must turn on a hypostasis of the instru- 
ment, on the transmutation of a use into a 
substance. Bergson, in a word, belongs here, 
more than ever, to the philosophic tradition. 
It is James again who strikes out anew. 

Let us consider why and how this is so. 

Three qualities, we have seen, mark off the 
philosophic tradition from radical empiricism. 
The first is its love of " wholeness" which leads 
to system-building, and the reconstruction of 



io6 William James and Henri Bergs on 

the variety and multitudinousness of expe- 
rience out of a few ultimate and primordial 
elements which are "universal' ' and pervasive. 
The second is the designation of all things 
which are composed of these elements or are 
different from them as appearance, to be set 
over against their own reality. The third is the 
assignment to reality of & compensatory nature; 
the assertion of its homogeneity with human 
nature in such wise that human life and 
human values are, without any possible risk, 
by it somehow conserved forever. Not all 
these traits appear simultaneously in each tra- 
ditional system. Some emphasize one, some 
another, but all in the long run, from Platonism 
to Absolutism, are distinctly marked by them. 
Bergson's philosophy is so not less but more, 
and his views, as we shall see, show in meta- 
physics, even as in epistemology, significant 
similitudes with great systems in the tradition 
— with, for example, that of Plato, and that of 
Spinoza. True, he does offer profound and 
elaborate criticisms of these thinkers, 1 but 

1 Cf. Creative Evolution, pp. 275-370, trans, by Mitchell. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 107 

these criticisms apply rather to generalities of 
emphasis and to certain verbal differences, than 
to the concrete detail of vision and to the con- 
structive development of reality from within. 
In these matters Bergson, at least in Creative 
Evolution, is far closer to Plato and Spinoza 
than he is to William James. For both these 
older philosophers the daily life is appearance 
and not reality. For both of them this appear- 
ance arises through the individuation of the 
primal reality: according to Plato, through 
the action of the Idea conceived, not as a form, 
but as a power, on non-being, or space (x c * > P a )> 
so that, though in itself one, it is none the less 
a heterogeneous multiplicity; 1 according to 

1 Bergson's fundamental objection to the theory of ideas is 
that it involves the assumption that, though the Idea is inert and 
motionless, it contains more than the moving. To introduce 
motion, therefore, something negative, a non-being, is required, 
and this degrades the Idea into all its appearances, multiplies it 
in space and in time. This objection, which may, as we shall 
see, be urged with equal force against the elan vital, is based on 
a traditional but none the less erroneous conception of the Pla- 
tonic Idea. The error derives partly from the mythological 
manner and poetic vagaries of Plato, partly from Plato's natural 
tendency (in which Bergson participates) toward hypostasis, 
so that he often seems to deal with Ideas as if they were super- 
sensible and inert essences, the models for all existences in space. 
But nobody who counts with the great critical dialogues, the 



108 William James and Henri Bergs on 

Spinoza, through the diversification of sub- 
stance, because of the mind's need of concep- 
tion, into infinite attributes and modes, which 
bear the same relation to the free, self-caused, 
and self-determining substance as the expe- 

Parmenides and the Thaeatetus, so skeptical and negative in their 
outcome, can persist in the notion that the hypostasis is Plato's 
real intention. These dialogues, as Campbell and Jackson have 
clearly demonstrated, came in the middle of Plato's career, 
between the greater Socratic dialogues, notably the Republic, and 
the later Platonic ones, the Philebus, the Timaeus, the Critias, 
the Laws. The doctrine of Ideas in the Republic is distinguished 
by the elaborate mythologic form in which it is set forth; but 
the Republic is fairly rigorous beside the Timaeus. It is hardly 
likely that Plato recanted and then recanted his recantation 
between the writing of the Republic and the writing of the Timaeus. 
There can scarcely have been any contradiction, in Plato's own 
mind, between the theory set forth in the Parmenides and that in 
the other dialogues. If now we take those to be poetic expressions 
of the theory in the Parmenides, what is the nature of the Ideas ? 

To begin with, the Ideas are dynamic forces, a congeries of 
possible being, having actual existence and leading matter on, 
shaping it, organizing it. They appear most clearly in action. 
In the tenth book of the Republic, Plato tells us that it is the user 
of the flute who knows the real flute. "The flute-player will tell 
the flute-maker which of his flutes is satisfactory to the per- 
former; he will tell him how he ought to make them, and the 
other will attend to his instruction." Generically, " the excellence 
or beauty or truth of every structure, animate or inanimate, and of 
every action of man, is relative to the use for which nature or 
the artist has intended them." This use or function is the idea, 
one, indivisible, simple, the definitive form of every material 
organization that expresses it or brings it about. 

In the second place, its activity, taken in and by itself, is of 
the durational sort, and is truly creative. In terms of the myth 



Intuition and Pragmatism 109 

rience of the daily life bears to the elan vital. 
Substance, Nature, God, is the same inter- 
penetration of diversities, the same uncom- 
pelled spontaneous activity, natura naturans. 
It is an effect which is its own cause; the self- 

of the Timaeus, the goodness of God overflows spontaneously, 
without requiring the shock of non-being or space (ny 6v). The 
latter does not degrade the Idea from its " eternity." Its 
role is identical with that of space in Bergson's system: it 
individuates and multiplies. It gives rise to Time — "the 
moving image of eternity" — as a spatialized version of the 
non-spatial activity. But, although appearing in this spatio- 
temporal multiplicity, the Idea, as the Parmenides points out, 
cannot itself be resident in nor divided among the things 
whose function it is, since, if it were, it could have neither 
unity nor functional character, i.e., it could not be Idea. 
Hence it could be neither the bond between two similars, such 
as the eye of the Pecten mollusk and the eye of the vertebrate, 
nor that unity which illuminates and accounts for the variety 
of the particulars. It is not a concept — i.e., a static form — 
yet it is what the mind knows in arresting particulars, since 
otherwise the knowledge of it would be irrelevant to these 
particulars. 

Such then is the Idea, considered rigorously and not poetically. 
So considered, its resemblance to the elan in nature and in its 
relations to matter is extraordinarily striking. We may note, 
before comparing the two in detail, that in this form the Idea is 
not finalistic. It is a function, but it is a function that serves 
nothing external to itself. That it is not mechanical need not 
be argued. So that in its divergence from mechanism, its resem- 
blance to, but non-identity with, finalism, it has one of the essen- 
tial traits of the elan. But consider the other traits of the elan 
as Bergson exhibits it in its relations to particulars of existence, 
i.e., the elan as the function of seeing in relation to the mollus- 
cular and the vertebrate eye. 



no William James and Henri Bergson 

identity of the different; the simultaneity of 
the successive; the oneness of the many. It 
is the force of self-preservation of a God who 
loves himself with an infinite love. Natura 
naturata, thought, extension, things, are the 

Since, argues M. Bergson, the Pecten and the vertebrate 
separate from the parent stem and grow in divergent directions 
long before the eye makes its appearance, every attempt to 
account for their identical appearance, by mechanism, finalism, 
neo-Darwinism, mutationism, neo-Lamarckism, invites mon- 
strous assumptions of practically impossible coincidences of 
infinite complexity. The quality of the light to which all eyes 
respond is not as a physical cause a sufficient explanation of their 
organic structure. The eye is more than a physical effect. It 
solves a problem. It is a photograph which has been turned 
into a photographic apparatus. The eye makes use of light. 
Hence, the causal relationship between light and the eye is that 
between something which unwinds and releases, and that which 
is unwound and released. Now the latter is an internal activity , 
"something quite different from what we call an effort, for never 
has an effort been known to produce the slightest complication 
of an organ, and yet an enormous number of complications, all 
admirably co-ordinated, have been necessary to pass from the 
pigment-spot of the Infusorian to the eye of the vertebrate. 
.... Yet this, like hereditary change in a definite direction, 
which continues to accumulate and add to itself so as to build 
up a more and more complex machine, must certainly be related to 
some sort of effort, but to an effort of far greater depth than the 
individual effort, far more independent of circumstances, an effort 
common to most representatives of the same species, inherent in 
the germs they bear rather than in their substance alone, an 
effort thereby assured of being passed on to their descendants. 

"The elan, then, is dynamic, transcends the individuals, yet 
belongs to all of them. Each of the individuals that participate 
in it is infinitely complex. It alone is simple. There is a con- 



Intuition and Pragmatism in 

same mechanical necessities, the same "spa- 
tialized sequences/' as the daily life. Even the 
freedom of man has the undetermined, self- 
contained quality of totality which is the cen- 
tral trait of the Bergsonian notion of freedom. 

trast between the infinite complexity of the organ and the extreme 

simplicity of the function The simplicity belongs to the 

object itself, and the infinite complexity to the views we take in 
turning round it, to the ' symbols by which our senses or intel- 
lects represent it to us or, more generally, to elements of a differ- 
ent order, with which we try to imitate it artificially, but with 
which it remains incommensurable, being of a different nature." 
This is almost the very language of Plato. The analogy is, how- 
ever, profounder still. This different order is materiality. It 
does not represent means employed but obstacles avoided. "It 
is a negation rather than a positive reality." By right, the 
function of vision should reveal an infinity of things we do not 
see. It is enchanneled, and the eye represents the channel 
through which it acts. Its structure conforms to the form of the 
act, at once expressing and restricting it. The greater the 
expression, the less the restriction, consequently the difference 
between the pigment-spot and the vertebrate eye. Both are 
equally co-ordinated because they are constructed to express the 
same function, but the function is freest in the vertebrate. Now, 
how is this function in its relation to the material that it organ- 
izes different from the Platonic Idea? It isn't. It bears, as 
a special function, even the same relation to "the original impetus 
of life" as a particular Idea bears to the Idea of the Good. It is 
effected in virtue of that impetus. It is implied therein, implied 
because life, like the idea, "is more than anything else a tendency 
to act on inert matter." 

The conclusion is, then, that the Idea resembles the ilan in 
that it is a unitary force, or dynamic function, acting on inert 
matter, organizing it, getting itself diversely expressed through 
these organizations, without being itself divided or divisible. 



ii2 William James and Henri Bergson 

There are, of course, the Spinozistic parallelism 
and eternalism, which at first blush seem an- 
tipodal to Bergsonian philosophy. But the 
antipodation is verbal and not real. The dis- 
tinctions are conceptual, 1 and the eternalism is 
the maximal fulness of duration. 2 In point 
of fact, each mode of substance or individual 
entity is the interpenetration of the residuum 
of being, and is a mode or particular only when 
its substantial cause is considered as external 
to it, i.e., when, in the Bergsonian sense, it is 
spatialized. Conceive it in its fulness, as inter- 
penetrated by the rest, and it is substance 
itself, eternal in the sense of perduring through 
all its externalizations, just as the Bergsonian 
real duration perdures through all its spatial- 
izations. Now, even as Spinoza's distinctions 
between appearance and reality follow from his 
conception of substance, so do Bergson's from 
his. The critics of this great and profound 
thinker have accused him without reason of 
inconsistency. His premise may be false, but 

1 Cf. Ethica, Book I, Definitions. 

2 Cf. Bergson, Introduction a la mitaphysique. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 113 

his deductions are not inconsistent. If reality 

is what Bergson thinks it, appearance must 

be as he describes it. But is reality as he 

thinks it ? 

II 

M. Bergson has a number of striking phrases 
by which he designates reality. It is real or 
pure duration (duree reelle), it is a formidable 
thrust (poussee formidable), it is the onrush 
of life (elan vital), it is the innermost spirit, it 
is activity, it is change, it is that of which the 
flow gives rise to all in experience that lives and 
changes. But it is not, as it appears in expe- 
rience, truly itself. It there appears deflected 
and distorted by an alien and secondary stuff 
with which it mixes, and which in turn it dis- 
torts. This alien or secondary stuff is matter 
or space, and duration must be extricated from 
its entanglement before it can be perceived in 
and by itself. This extrication is what has 
been accomplished in intuition. Now, what 
is the reality so attained to be known as ? 

To be concrete, consider the paragraph or 
the page I have just written. It belongs to 



ii4 William James and Henri Bergs on 

the common data of the daily life. It is an 
appearance of reality — a collection of marks 
and symbols, themselves spatial forms, spread 
over the space of the page, and standing for 
and representing something to which they are 
somehow allied and which has been the effective 
cause of this particular spatial complex. This 
something is the one thought which the 
paragraph expresses, and which you apprehend 
when you read the signs that compose it. But 
these signs are not one. The paragraph can 
be subdivided into sentences, each before and 
after another, the sentences into words, the 
words into letters, the letters into smaller shapes 
or simpler sounds, and so on endlessly. But 
now the idea which has so spread and ramified 
by means of symbols and space is not at all 
a thing in which I feel a definite, exclusive 
before-and-after, a diversity of distinct sym- 
bols with distinct meanings, having distinct 
relations to each other. All I feel is one mean- 
ing. Its quale is a definite tendency to write. 
And as I write, I am not aware of each word 
before I write it. I do not know what it will 



Intuition and Pragmatism 115 

be. I discover what has become a particular 
word by the act of writing. The act seems to 
deposit the word as it moves along, and with 
each word deposited it has externalized itself 
more and more in space. It seems like the 
unrolling of something rolled up, but not the 
unrolling of a reel, on which one thing is laid 
over the other, but rather the unrolling of a 
thing all of whose parts are one inside the other, 
such that, without space, you cannot distin- 
guish part from part, all are so absolutely one. 
When I read the paragraph over, I recover this 
unity, but not in its fulness or adequacy. I 
have to recompose it, and I feel it as a thing 
attained piecemeal, not at one indivisible view. 
Why? Because the act has been spatialized. 
Suppose, now, we reverse the process, and 
try to roll up this act which has unrolled itself 
here, aiming to recover its central, indivisible 
tension. The mind moves hereupon not from 
within outward, but from without inward. 
Read the paragraph over several times. At the 
first reading, each word, perhaps each letter, 
stands out in its place, alone, independent, 



n6 William James and Henri Bergson 

with no clear or intimate relation to the others. 
At the second, they all seem closer together, 
the space they cover seems not so great, we 
say the reading is swifter, we take in a sentence 
at a time, now, instead of a word at a time. 
At the third reading, this is still more true. 
We feel as if we were skipping passages, but 
we know that we are not, because we know that 
in the end we can reproduce the identical one 
idea which the paragraph conveys, with all its 
ramifications and differences, without feeling 
anything more than the presence of this con- 
tinuous, unvarying ideational impulse. What 
has happened? The idea has been changed 
back from a fact into an act, from something 
done into something doing. In the repeated 
readings we have despatialized it. Letters, 
words, sentences have, in the mind, become 
more and more intimate. Instead of empty 
spaces between them they have touched, then 
from touching they have passed into one 
another, until each has become indiscernible 
from all and all from each. They have reverted 
to the status of that pure inward impulse of 



Intuition and Pragmatism 117 

which they were the spatial expression, the 
material incarnation. 

Consider, however, that this impulse, which 
incarnated itself in the paragraph, is but one 
of a countless multitude of impulses which 
move us. Simple as it is beside the words and 
sentences that express it, it must be, taken in 
and by itself, related to the whole of our lives 
as words and sentences are related to it. It 
must be a mere spatialization of a totality 
which in itself is not spatial, and which, beside 
it, is one and infinitely complex. Let us, then, 
withdraw the mind's eye from the details of life 
in their isolation. Let us bring them together, 
as we brought together the letters and sentences 
of our paragraph. They touch, they inter- 
penetrate, they fuse. We behold the fulness of 
our selfhood, an enduring tension, which rami- 
fies, according to need, into memories, emotions, 
wishes, ideas, into those mental forms which 
the psychologist studies singly, but which is 
in itself all these at one and the same time. 

Nor is it alone this indivisible multiplicity. 
It swells, changes, grows. We feel this swelling, 



n8 William James and Henri Bergson 

changing, growing within its very heart — an 
increase without enlargement. How else, and 
where else, if we abstract space absolutely? 
For then there is, as there must be, the actual 
succession of an inner experience, but such 
succession cannot make a distinction of before 
and after. A distinction would mean a juxta- 
position, however slight, and juxtaposition, 
involving the mutual externality of the juxta- 
posed, is spatial. But by hypothesis and by 
act we have abstracted from space. We con- 
front the innermost essence of mind in its 
purity. We see that it is labile, that it is pul- 
sation, and that each pulsation, as it adds 
itself to its predecessors, preserves itself with- 
out distinguishing itself from them. The 
innermost life is a solidarity, at once self- 
identical and changing, "a continuous melody 
.... which carries itself on, indivisible from 
the beginning to the end of our conscious 
existence." 

Now, being innermost, this life cannot help 
being psychical, but its psyche is not the psyche 
of consciousness and personality. It is the 



Intuition and Pragmatism 119 

more primordial spirit of which the conscious- 
ness we know is a spatialization, a segmenta- 
tion, of which the personality we are aware of 
is a contraction and restriction. That it is 
soonest and most readily to be discovered in 
the profundities of our own spirit is our grace, 
which makes humanity perhaps more its kin 
than any other living or moving being, since 
in man the cosmic spirit has most nearly liber- 
ated itself from the trammels of matter. But, 
in point of fact, man is a very limited concre- 
tion of it. Intuition reveals spirit as the force 
and go of all that moves and acts. It, and it 
alone, is the true metaphysical reality. 

What, now, are its metaphysical character- 
istics ? 

To begin with, it is flux. It is movement 
and change, and these, as such, are absolutely 
indivisible. To arrest either is to destroy it, 
for it is a transition, not a condition, and can, 
therefore, never coincide with immobility. It 
may be imperceptibly brief, it may be long 
beyond perception, infinitely long. But it 
cannot be decomposed. Motion is motion and 



120 William James and Henri Bergs on 

must always be that. To spatialize it is to 
think it in terms of its opposite, of immobility. 
To spatialize it is to contradict its nature, 
destroy its identity. That identity may be, it 
will be seen, a " self -contradictory" identity, 
but, once captured and defined, it must remain 
unchanged, by the rules of the logic of identity, 
throughout the discussion. To these rules 
Bergson rigorously adheres, in all his books. 
Consequently the life of all existence becomes 
conceived qualitatively as one, and its diversity 
and immobility become mere appearances. 
" There are," he writes, 1 " changes, but there are 
no things that change. Change has no need of 
a support. There are movements, but there 
are not necessarily invariable things that move; 
movement does not imply a something that 
possesses it" (mobile). Immobility is really 
appearance which the sense of sight deceives 
us into taking for reality. But science assures 
us that all matter consists in fact of movement; 
and a thing's movement is but a movement 
of movements. Hence, movement, and not 

1 Perception du changement, p. 24. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 121 

matter, is substance, and because of the con- 
tinuity and unity of movement, the world it 
expresses itself by is maximally substantial and 
durable. "For if change is real and even con- 
stitutive of all reality, we must think of the 
past as persisting unchanged in its entirety in 
the one indivisible act of change," 1 just as the 
notes of a melody persist unchanged in the one 
indivisible melody, or the meanings of the 
beginnings of our paragraph in the one indi- 
visible meaning of the paragraph. Both are 
change and immutability at once. 

Not to believe this is to be illogical, to be 
subject to a mere philosophical illusion. This 
is the illusion that real time is decomposable 
into instants. Such instants are fundamental 
in mathematics, but mathematics is only a 
science of space. It required that any two of 
them cannot be separated by a time-interval, 
for time is nothing more than their juxtapo- 
sition. But if they are separated by nothing, 
they are one and not two. Two mathematical 

1 The italics are mine. There is the significant deductive 
transition in the phrase "we must think," for the necessity is 
logical only. 



122 William James and Henri Bergson 

points that touch are confounded one in the 
other: they interpenetrate and become an 
identity. Logic, hence, compels the assump- 
tion of an "interval of duration." How great 
this interval shall be is determined only by 
our capacity for attention. Let the attention 
expand indefinitely, and it embraces more and 
more and more of the past. The present, 
indeed, is merely the field of instant attention. 
To say that any portion of it is destroyed when 
it drops from attention would be obviously 
wrong. It does not cease to exist, but it 
becomes past. The past is that part of the 
present which the mind neglects; when the 
mind again attends to it, it becomes present. 
But this present is not a mere simultaneity. 
It is " something continually present and con- 
tinually moving," "an enduring present," in 
which the past stays subconscious, waiting 
only on our needs to bring up to consciousness 
its appropriate part, and surging up in its 
totality whenever the attention on externals is 
relaxed, as in the cases of drowning and other 
forms of vital crisis and sudden death. Then 



Intuition and Pragmatism 123 

the attention turns inward, and one's whole life 
unrolls before the mind's eye. Logic and expe- 
rience both thus compel us to believe the past 
conserves itself automatically, that this self- 
conservation in the present is cosmic, and that 
it is nothing else than the indivisibility of 
change. 

But if this is the nature of the cosmos, then, 
though an infinite deal is continually adding 
itself to whatever exists, nothing is ever, nor can 
be, subtracted. The substantiality and dura- 
bility of the world are maximal. Change itself 
is that hidden substance which philosophers 
have sought, which flows through the fingers 
that seek by grasping to arrest it. Perceived 
in its nakedness, it is neither unstable nor 
immutable, but the very stuff of duration, at 
once indivisible and changing. Yet further: 
that which is indivisibly dynamic cannot truly 
be differentiated into cause and effect. Life 
is a concrete duration, the unity of the past 
with the present. Hence, if it changes, the 
source of the change is in itself, not in anything 
external. Cause is self -caused; effect is self- 



124 William James and Henri Bergs on 

effectuation; change is creative growth, deter- 
mined neither mechanically nor teleologically. 
In other words, life, as perceived in intuition 
is free. For, if it were not, the indivisibility 
of change would be destroyed, duration would 
be spatialized, it would be possible to fore- 
cast events infallibly. Indeed, determinism is 
equivalent to the possibility. Yet how is any 
foretelling whatever possible? Does not the 
understanding of the true nature of a cause 
require also the perception of its effect? And 
how is the effect to be perceived unless it is 
already present, and, if it is already present, 
what can be meant by prediction? Actually, 
in the inwardness of duration, not even action 
itself can predict. There are multitudes in the 
realization of an ideal that the ideal has no 
inkling of. Life, then, eludes prediction. But 
does it also escape causation? Determinism 
is not alone the possibility of prediction, it is 
also mechanistic causal necessity. Can life 
elude this necessity? Yes, however cause be 
defined, life can. For intuition shows us life 
as persistent variation; hence, cause, defined 



Intuition and Pragmatism 125 

as unvarying antecedent of its effect, cannot 
apply to life. Or take cause as common-sense 
tends to take it; as a compromise between the 
identity of cause and effect with time, or differ- 
entiating creative activity. Its necessity is 
reached by the element of identity, by the 
repetition of the same — the same number, the 
same quality, the same relation — in the effect. 
Then, as cause approaches necessity, it goes 
farther and farther from true activity, farther 
and farther from duration and freedom, where 
alone true causation exists. There necessity 
is a pure negation. There the future exists in 
the present only as a vague possibility. The 
transition from present to future is seen by 
intuition to be, first of all, an effort, and, 
secondly, an effort which does not always real- 
ize the felt possibility, yet which rests quite 
complete in whatever future it has brought 
about. Life is free. 

In sum : Ultimate reality is of the same stuff 
as our inner life, something akin to the will, 
the go of our own existence, which " unwinds " 
itself — an enduring act, continuous, indivisible, 



126 William James and Henri Bergs on 

substantial, creative, free, an act which is the 
unity and interpenetration of all that lives and 
moves and has its being, an incessant life which 
is the concretion of all durations, of all that 
apparent diversity of beings whose existence is 
materialization of this same formidable impetus, 
this elan of life, which is their unshatterable 
and persistent substance. 

Such, then, is the fundamental reality which 
intuition reveals. How different in character 
and direction from the reality of the daily life, 
with its numerous individuals, its unchanging 
solids, its immutable concepts, its many checks 
and defeats, its few successes! How could so 
perfect a thing as the elan vital give rise to so 
imperfect a thing as conscious experience? 
Never, of itself. The ordinary world of men 
and things is a degradation of the elan. It is 
the disruption of its unity by means of the 
shock of space and matter. These are the 
enemy, these are the evil principle, and of the 
war of these with the life-force worlds are born. 

What are they? How are they known? 
The more fundamental one is space. This 



Intuition and Pragmatism 127 

Bergson assumes, but whether as the meta- 
physical peer of pure duration, or something 
secondary and inferior, one may not absolutely 
say. In his earlier thinking, the notion appears 
that space is a Kantian form of intuition and 
has no reality apart from the mind that thinks 
it. "We have assumed," he writes in Donnees 
immediates de la conscience, "the existence of 
a homogeneous space, and, with Kant, dis- 
tinguished this space from the matter that fills 
it. With him we have admitted that homo- 
geneous space is a form of our sensibility. " It 
is an "infinitely fine network which we stretch 
beneath material continuity in order to make 
ourselves masters of it, to decompose it accord- 
ing to the plan of our activities and need." 
And this notion occurs again and again, though 
less explicitly stated, in his later work. Space, 
in Matter and Memory , is called a "diagram- 
matic design of our eventual action on matter." 
And in Creative Evolution it is more than once 
designated as the practical form of our intelli- 
gent action on things. From this point of view, 
it is not a secondary thing but a tertiary one, 



128 William James and Henri Bergs on 

arising after a creature having need of it has 
been created by the evolutionary action of 
duration. But this view of space is incidental 
to the exigencies of exposition. It is not com- 
pelled by the demands of Bergson's first inde- 
finable, pure duration. That requires over 
against it, if it is to be a factor in accounting for 
the course and character of experience, some- 
thing with which it may combine, on which it 
may act. This something need not be so real 
as pure duration is, it may be metaphysically 
secondary, an inversion, but it must be 
opposite. 

Such an opposite is space. "There is a 
real space without duration .... and a real 
duration, the heterogeneous moments of which 
interpenetrate." Space is the inversion of 
duration. Duration is interpenetration, the 
psychical organization of heterogeneous quali- 
ties that are immanently successive, one to 
another. Space is juxtaposition, the simul- 
taneous externality of homogeneous points, 
whose essential character is quantitative, not 
qualitative. Space is an empty and homo- 



Intuition and Pragmatism 129 

geneous medium which is self-sufficient, void of 
every quality, amorphous, inert, but a "reality 
as solid as sensations themselves," though of a 
different order. Consequently space is a thing 
outside ourselves, "a mutual externality 
without succession," but an absolute reality 
on which we act (and it must be real 
therefore, since it is impossible for action 
to move in the unreal) and which we can 
and do know in its absoluteness by means of 
mathematics. 

But mathematics, absolute, real — are not 
these contradictory terms? They would be, 
if they were not discoverable in the same intui- 
tion that reveals real duration. The only 
difference is that the direction of the intuition 
must be changed. Consider again the intui- 
tion of any paragraph of this chapter. Its 
psychic purity is attained by the incessant 
accumulation and interpenetration of its details. 
What dilutes this purity? The fact that in 
expression these details, instead of staying an 
ever-changing, fluid, tensive unity, become 
external to one another. This externalization 



130 William James and Henri Bergson 

is dissipation. 1 Instead of there being from 
moment to moment more than there was 
before, there is from moment to moment less. 
The force spreads, dissipates, tends to cease. 
If it could cease utterly and absolutely, it 
would be indistinguishable from space. That, 
however, does not happen. The written or 
spoken paragraph is not pure space. It is 
matter. Matter is disintegrating spirit, spirit 
running down, on the way to space. 2 Spirit 
absolutely run down would have become its 
opposite, space. Space gathered up, inter- 
penetrated, might possibly be spirit. Conse- 
quently, behind these two " absolutes," " dura- 
tion' ' and " space," which are inversions of one 
another, opposite orders, interfering with one 
another in such a way that the absence of one 
means the presence of its opposite, there is a 
unity " vaster and higher" of which these are 
perhaps complementary differentiations, as in- 
stinct and intelligence are of the life of man. 

1 Cf. Creative Evolution, pp. 249-59. 

2 M. Bergson regards the second law of thermodynamics as 
the most metaphysical of all physical laws. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 131 

And between these two poles of the utterly 
transcendent and barely suggested unity of 
which they are differentiations lies matter, just 
as real as they, to be known immediately and 
directly by the same intuitive act, only reversed 
in its duration. For matter is life " undoing 
itself," an absolute reality which physics 
studies and reveals, a thing no more than "pure 
duration ballasted by geometry" and partaking 
of the nature of both. But the intuitive act 
reversed in its direction is intelligence, concep- 
tualization, analysis. The ultimate province 
of the intellect, consequently, must be pure 
space; and its ultimate form, geometry. Now 
intermediate between the intuition of life and 
the intuition of space lies the intuition of 
matter. This is attained in "pure perception" 
and in the mutually external categories and 
forms of the understanding, in concepts, these 
being static, isolated, cinematographic snap- 
shots of the flux, catching its externalizations. 
"In reality, life is a movement, materiality 
is the inverse movement, and each of these two 
movements is simple, the matter which forms 



132 William James and Henri Bergs on 

a world being an undivided flux, and undivided 
also the life that runs through it, cutting out 
in it living beings all along its track." 1 

Hence, matter, in so far as it implies dura- 
tion, is also a continuum and conterminous with 
spirit. It involves a before and after, because 
it is spatial, but it involves also the linking to- 
gether of these successive moments of time "by 
a thread of variable quality which cannot be 
without some likeness to the continuity of our 
own consciousness." Matter endures and is, 
qua enduring, the pure flux of dynamic energy 
which the physicist has made the goal of his 
researches. But if matter is a continuous flux 
of energy, it cannot be the collection of the dis- 
crete objects of experience to which we formally 
apply the term. These are tertiary in that they 
are derivatives of matter. They are the ap- 
pearance of appearance, and are appearance 
to appearance. They are the latest events in 
the cosmic drama whose climax is Man. 

The title of this drama is Creative Evolution. 
Its great protagonists, its hero and villain, 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 249. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 133 

when M. Bergson raises the curtain for us, are 
Pure Duration and Space, Spirit and Matter, 
Elan Vital, and Inertia, these complementary 
and inverse aspects of reality, so essentially like 
Spinoza's Cogitatio and Extensio, attributes of 
one substance and in it, identical; so essentially 
like Plato's idea and non-being, absorbable in 
the neo-Platonic One. The drama arises out of 
the inward incompatibility of these two with 
one another. They cannot live together in 
democratic amity. The existence of the one 
involves the mutilation if not the destruction 
of the other, without concession, without com- 
promise, even in that apparent compromise we 
call matter. The life-force, which is conscious- 
ness, "need to create," free, spiritual, self- 
cumulative, is suppressed and constrained by 
the rigidity and vacuity of space. A power, 
finite and given once for all, but containing 
within itself numberless potentialities, not 
unlike Platonic ideas, it cannot freely generate, 
fulfil, and gather within itself the more that 
continuously grows from it. For the life-force 
is a thing that grows by what it feeds on, and 



134 William James and Henri Bergson 

it feeds upon itself. Matter hinders and inter- 
rupts this creative growth, and hence it becomes 
the task of the life-force to overcome the checks 
and hindrances of its opponent, and to convert 
it from an opponent into a servant. Life suc- 
ceeds in doing so, but not without a price. It 
pays for its conquest with its unity. In its 
contact with matter, life is comparable to an 
impulsion or an impetus; regarded in itself, 
it is "an immensity of potentiality, a mutual 
encroachment of thousands and thousands of 
tendencies, " which nevertheless are thousands 
and thousands "only when regarded as outside 
each other, i.e., when spatialized." 1 It is com- 
pelled to divide, to adopt divergent lines of 
growth, in unforeseeable directions; it is com- 
pelled to "insinuate" itself into matter, "to 
adopt its rhythm" and movement. By so 
doing, however, it attains its ends. It con- 
quers matter, and, by organizing, diverts it 
from its own rigidity to the uses of life. The 
core of this diversion is the accumulation and 
expenditure of stores of energy "by means of 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 258. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 135 

a matter as supple as possible in directions 
variable and unforeseen." 

The first act in the conquest of matter, hence, 
is the evolution of the vegetable. Whatever 
life may feed on, its ultimate food is vegeta- 
tion. " Vegetables alone gather in the solar 
energy and animals do but borrow it from 
them." By means of the " chlorophyllian 
function," vegetation uses the solar energy to 
fix the carbon of carbon-dioxid gas, and thereby 
to store it, for use as need be. But the vege- 
table is torpid, it is nearer in its action to mat- 
ter than to the unexpected freedom of life. It 
could not both gradually store and suddenly 
use energy. In the vegetable, therefore, the 
struggle between life and matter is something 
of a draw. Life has gathered up matter, but 
the matter holds back life. Life has still not 
come to its own freedom. 

The second act consists of the divergence of 
organization under the stress of this tendency 
toward action in variable and unforeseen 
directions. Plants went on doing as they 
always did, but side by side with them there 



136 William James and Henri Bergs on 

developed the animal, whose characteristic it 

is to set free stored-up energy. This act 

involved many scenes, many more divergences, 

in not all of which did life conquer matter. 

We must take into account retrogressions, arrests, 
accidents of every kind. And we must remember 
above all that each species behaves as if the general 
movement of life had stopped at it, instead of passing 
through it. It thinks only of itself, it lives only for 
itself. Hence the numberless struggles that we behold 
in nature. Hence a discord, striking and terrible, but 
for which the original principle of life must not be held 
responsible. 1 

Alone to the compulsion of matter does the 
responsibility belong. For life itself is not 
thinkable either as pure unity or pure multi- 
plicity. It is One that rejects the category 
of oneness; many, yet rejecting the category 
of manyness. It might have been, and would 
more easily have been, just itself, rather than 
the diversity of individuals and of societies 
where struggle for life is that discord "so strik- 
ing and terrible." But unity and multiplicity 
as such belong to matter, and matter compels 
it to choose one of the two. Yet its choice will 

1 Op. cit., pp. 254-55. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 137 

never be definitive; it will leap from one to the 
other indefinitely. 

The pure animal, though more explosive and 
unaccountable than the plant, is automatic. 
Its explosions are marked by the absence of 
variety, by sameness. Spirit is not yet com- 
pletely liberated. To become so, it needs an 
organized matter of maximum instability. 
The making and maintenance of this is the 
third act of life's struggle with matter, the 
climactic act, in which it asserts itself, master of 
matter at last, by means of the human brain. 
This differs from other brains in that "the 
number of mechanisms it can set up, and con- 
sequently the choice that it gives as to which 
among them shall be released, is unlimited." 
This makes it differ from other brains not in 
degree, but in kind. 1 So "with man, con- 
sciousness breaks the chain. In man and man 
alone it sets itself free." 2 His body is his 
machine which he uses as he pleases. Because 
of his complex brain with its capacity for 

1 Ibid., p. 263. 

2 Ibid., p. 264. 



138 William James and Henri Bergs on 

opposed motor mechanisms; because of his 
language with its capacity for incarnating 
consciousness in an immaterial body; because 
of his social life with its capacity for storing 
and preserving effort as language preserves 
thought, man is free. In him Spirit triumphs 
completely over Matter, Duration over Space, 
the Life-Force over Inertia. The drama has 
a happy ending. Seeing the world so, 

we feel ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, 
humanity no longer seems isolated in the nature that 
it dominates. As the smallest grain of dust is bound 
up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it 
in that undivided movement of descent which is mate- 
riality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest 
to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time 
in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but 
evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the move- 
ment of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living 
hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous 
push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man 
bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in 
space and time, is one immense army galloping 
beside and before and behind each of us in an over- 
whelming charge able to beat down every resistance 
and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even 
death. 1 

1 Op. cit., pp. 270-71. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 139 

III 

There exists in philosophy, writes William 
James, 1 a 

plain alternative. Is the manyness in oneness that 
indubitably characterizes the world we inhabit, a 
property only of the absolute whole of things, so that 
you must postulate that one-enormous-whole indi- 
visibly as the prius of there being any many at all — 
in others words, start with the rationalistic block- 
universe, entire, unmitigated, complete? — or can the 
finite elements have their own aboriginal forms of 
manyness in oneness, and where they have no imme- 
diate oneness still be continued into one another by 
intermediary terms — each one of these terms being 
one with its next neighbors, and yet the total " one- 
ness' ' never getting absolutely complete? 

Of this alternative, Bergson, we have seen, 
chooses explicitly neither horn. In its intrin- 
sic nature pure duration is an ineffable totum 
simul, not yet differentiated into the inverse 
movements of life and matter, and rejecting, 
like Plotinos' One, the categories of both one- 
ness and manyness. Implicitly Bergson chooses 
the former of these alternatives. He observes 
with James that experience has contradictory 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 326. 



140 William James and Henri Bergs on 

aspects, that it possesses both oneness and 
manyness at the same time. Their co-presence 
in experience gives rise to innumerable philo- 
sophic difficulties, notably the great antino- 
mies which troubled philosophers from Zeno 
to Kant. How surmount the difficulties, how 
solve the antinomies? If you study their 
'basis and origin, you observe that they arise 
from the attempt to explain manyness by one- 
ness and oneness by manyness. Philosophic 
salvation, then, must lie in a new principle of 
explanation. What shall it be, and be new? 
Why, simply rendering unto Caesar that which 
is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's. 
No wonder logical puzzles and essential con- 
tradictions persist in philosophy. They must, 
since they are no more than attempts to recon- 
cile the irreconcilable. Segregate these, let 
the same account for the same alone, let each 
principle account only for itself, and the puzzle 
disappears. You find, to begin with, the ab- 
solute oneness, the undesignable and tran- 
scendent unity of life, accounting for motion, 
action, continuity, for all that has the quality 



Intuition and Pragmatism 141 

of unity. In the Bergsonian world, the quali- 
tative basis is given at once, and whatever 
comings there are, are somewhat forecast in the 
" original impetus" and contingent on its 
material obstacles: "Life does not proceed by 
the association and addition of elements, but 
by the dissociation and division." It is crea- 
tion that goes on forever in virtue of an initial 
movement, which constitutes the unity of the 
organic world. It is the continuity of a "single 
and identical elan" which has split up along 
the lines of a divergent evolution. It is what 
is "common" to all divergences, and these are 
complements one of the other, in such wise 
that their very complementariness and harmony 
contain and presuppose and depend on an 
"identity of impulsion." The quoted terms 
are Bergson's own. On the other hand, you 
find the absolute manyness, the Bradleyan 
unrelatable discreteness which is the designable 
diversity of space, accounting for all that 
derives from it. And so long as you confine 
each principle to its own sphere, you get into 
no difficulties. Seek, however, to take the 



142 William James and Henri Bergs on 

concrete individuality of experience at its 
face value, as manyness-in-oneness, and try to 
explain one by the other — then, presto, all the 
difficulties reappear. Time, action, life, can 
explain only those things which are identical 
with them; space, inertness, matter, can explain 
only those things which are identical with them. 
Antinomies arise when the explanations offered 
are transverse. In point of fact they are not 
alternatives; each member of the pair is valid 
in its own field. If, therefore, the universe seems 
disorderly, it seems so merely. There is no real 
disorder. There is only the substitution of 
the spatial for the temporal order, the material 
for the spiritual, and conversely. Chaos and 
the void are pseudo-ideas. The realities are 
spirit and space. Ultimately, of course, these 
two fields may be derivable from something 
vaster and higher, a unity which embraces and 
reconciles both. How, is not written. The 
course of experience is nevertheless to be ex- 
plained by these diverse and opposite principles. 
Hence, unity immediately and ultimately 
includes for Bergson a one-enormous- whole 



Intuition and Pragmatism 143 

indivisibly given as the prim of the vital or 
organic many. Diversity, similarly, involves 
an absolutely irreconcilable externality. Both 
of these are transcendental principles and not 
discoverable as such in the immediacies of expe- 
rience. Each requires, in order to be perceived, 
the absoluteness of intuition, the intuition of 
the spirit, in the one case; of the intellect, in 
the other. Each is the limit reached by a 
rigorous application of the identity logic. Con- 
sequently the Bergsonian philosophy is involved 
in both the fallacies of traditional metaphysics 
— the fallacy of division which is the differen- 
tia of apriorism and the fallacy of composi- 
tion which is the differentia of empiricism. 
Each of these fallacies is a metaphysical dogma. 
One says that the part has no reality save in 
terms of the whole; the other says that the 
whole is nothing more than an aggregate of 
parts. What is significant is the bond that 
unites the two and makes them harmonious 
parts of one identical tradition. This bond 
is the dogma of unreality of relations. For 
apriorism, relations have ever been internal, 



144 William James and Henri Bergs on 

so that the universe was always a block: the 
whole concentrated in every point. For empiri- 
cism relations have been utterly external such 
that the entities or impressions which compose 
the flux of experience could never touch, never 
influence each other, never make any real 
difference to each other. This double status 
of relations is accepted in toto by Bergson. In 
the elan, the interpenetration of the hetero- 
geneous is such that distinctions cannot be made 
and hence must be artificially supplied by the 
mind; in space the discreteness is so absolute 
that nothing happens there unless a mind 
internalizes its contents. 1 

Now, if any one thing more than any other 
sets James beyond the philosophic tradition and 
distinguishes radical and immediate empiricism 
from both the empiricism and the apriorism 
of tradition, it is his readiness to take relations, 
conjunctive as well as disjunctive, internal no 
less than external, at their face value, whenever 
and wherever they appear. Neither the sub- 
stantial flux, he points out, interpenetrative to 

1 Cf. Creative Evolution, pp. 147-49, 250, 356, 367-68. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 145 

the uttermost, nor yet the discrete space, 
external to the uttermost, is barren of con- 
junctive relations. Neither one is oppugnant 
to and completely exclusive of the other. 
There is not a block of oneness that we call life, 
and a hegemony of bare homogeneous many- 
ness that we call space, nor yet an ineffable 
totum simul which is, and still is not that, like 
Plotinos' One, rejecting both categories. There 
is & real combination of manyness and oneness 
in which the relations that bind, and whose ac- 
tion makes the oneness, are as immediate data 
of sense-perception as the terms that are bound; 
and the relations that distinguish, and whose 
actions make the manyness, have as legitimate 
a metaphysical status as the terms that they 
differentiate. There is no whole in which all 
that is to be is somehow foreshadowed and 
predetermined; there is no contingency which 
is extra-spiritual and involves no difference in 
the quality of spirit. There is no necessary 
conservation of the past. Destruction is as 
real as creation, contingency is a trait of 
every entity that exists, and, what exists, exists 



146 William James and Henri Bergs on 

piecemeal, and not in terms of a whole, in- 
divisible act which cuts through matter. 

The divergence here indicated is so profound 
that it seems strange that any similarity what- 
ever should exist between these two thinkers, 
and stranger still that the one should feel him- 
self indebted to the other for anything what- 
ever. But does not, indeed, the existence of 
such a conjunction amid such diversity consti- 
tute a prima facie exhibition of the manyness- 
and-oneness of experience which James points 
out ? We have seen 1 that both these thinkers 
are, from the outset, temporalists, that both 
are agreed as to the inadequacy of static con- 
cepts to act as substitutes for activities, and 
as to the distortion of reality which arises when 
concepts are taken as the identical equivalents 
of things which they represent. Concepts, 
like the rest of reality, are only self-revealing, 
and in use they are controllers rather than 
revealers. But here the resemblance stops. 
The self which concepts reveal is the selfhood 
of matter and space according to Bergson, and 

1 Supra, chap. ii. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 147 

the dimension in which they exist is not the 
dimension of life at all. They are metaphysi- 
cally as well as functionally tertiary. Not so 
for James. Their metaphysical status is not 
different from that of any other entity; it is 
their function that is different, and it is the 
confusion of status with function that is, for 
him, the source of metaphysical error. 

Now, it is with Bergson's treatment of con- 
cepts in their relation to activity, movement, 
and life that James is most concerned. What 
is it that he gains from Bergson? He gains, 
to begin with, freedom to accept experience at 
its face value; he gains, in the second place, 
confirmation that this face value is not illusory. 

The assumption which underlay James's 
treatment of the greater problems of psychology 
was the assumption of the dualism of mind and 
matter. The assumption was methodological, 
not metaphysical, and the theory of psycho- 
physical parallelism was dirempted at one 
point by a theory of interaction for which the 
warrant was empirico-ontologic, rather than a 
logical deduction from the parallelistic premise. 



148 William James and Henri Bergs on 

Logic demanded the correlation of brain 
states with mental states. But whereas brain 
states might be compounded, mental states 
could not so be. They were fluid, evanes- 
cent, not perdurable, and for each brain 
state there could be but one and only one 
mental state. 

The so-called mental compounds are simple psychic 
reactions of a higher type. The form itself of them 
. ... is something new. 1 We can't say that aware- 
ness of the alphabet as such is nothing more than 
twenty-six awarenesses, each of a separate letter; for 
those are twenty-six distinct awarenesses of single letters 
without others, w T hile their so-called sum is one aware- 
ness of every letter with its comrades. There is thus 
something new in the collective consciousness. It 
means the same letters, indeed, but it knows them in 
this novel way. It is safer .... to treat the con- 
sciousness of the alphabet as a twenty-seventh fact, 
the substitute and not sum of the twenty-six simpler 
consciousnesses, and to say that while under certain 
physiological conditions they alone are produced — 
other, more complex physiological conditions result in 

in its production instead The higher thoughts 

.... are psychic units, not compounds; but, for all 
that, they may know together as a collective multi- 
tude the very same objects which under other condi- 

1 The italics are mine. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 149 

tions are known separately by as many simple thoughts. 
The theory of combination, I was forced to conclude, 
is thus untenable, being both logically nonsensical and 
practically unnecessary. 1 

Such is the logical outcome enforced by the 
assumption of psychophysical parallelism. But 
this is an outcome which, while true in 
many instances, flies none the less in the face 
of the facts in many others. In the physical 
world, for instance, 

we make with impunity the assumption that one and 
the same material object can figure in an indefinitely 
large number of different processes at once. An air 
particle or an ether particle " compounds" the differ- 
ent directions of movement imprinted on it without 
obliterating their several individualities. It delivers 
them distinct, on the contrary, at as many several 
" receivers" (ear, eye, or what not) as may be " tuned" 
to that effect. 2 

Why, distinctly true in physics, should this 
not also be true in psychology ? In the " expe- 
rience of activity" what is "the true relation 
of the longer-span to the shorter-span activi- 
ties"? 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 188-89. 

2 Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 125-26. 



150 William James and Henri Bergson 

When, for example, a number of "ideas" .... 
grow confluent in a larger field of consciousness, do the 
smaller activities still coexist with the wider activities 
then experienced by the conscious subject? And, if 
so, do the wide activities accompany the narrow ones 
inertly or do they exert control ? Or do they perhaps 
utterly supplant and replace them and short circuit 
their effects P 1 

Wundt and other psychologists had had the 
advantage of conceiving the " compounding 
of consciousness" as analogous to the com- 
pounding of matter. They exceeded thereby 
strict logic, and until he had read Bergson, 
James was unwilling to commit this excess. 
But the theory of consciousness which Bergson 
maintains and defends is, significantly enough, 
exactly that which, because of his reading of 
Bergson's works, James abandons. The idea 
of the alphabet is, indeed, for Bergson, a 
" simple psychic reaction of a higher type" of 
which "the form itself is something new." It 
is true that, according to the Bergsonian phi- 
losophy, the earlier states are conserved as 
memory, but not each in its individuality after 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 394. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 151 

the analogy of physical motions cited above, 
but penetrated through and through by all the 
rest, " every letter with its comrades," and the 
whole heterogeneous unity related internally. 
So that the consciousness of the aphabet is a 
twenty-seventh fact, a psychic unit, not a com- 
pound, a thing absolutely new. There can be 
found in Bergson's notion of compounding 
nothing analogous to a physical compounding of 
entities to which James has committed himself. 
Extraordinary and paradoxical! until the can- 
did reader of James observes that what con- 
cerns him in the Bergsonian philosophy is not 
its conceptions of spirit and of matter, but its 
critique of intellectualism, its analysis of the 
relations of concepts to motion, to the con- 
tinuum, to the perceptual flux. This analysis 
frees James from the decrees of logic and per- 
mits him to accept unequivocally the self- 
portrayal of immediate experience. 

And in all this Bergson is still at the position 
in psychology that James has abandoned, and 
where James strikes out toward a neutralistic 
pluralism and radical empiricism, Bergson 



152 William James and Henri Bergson 

erects the methodological assumptions of psy- 
chophysics into the ontological dualism of spirit 
and matter of the philosophic tradition, sub- 
dued by the shadow of a Plotinian monism. 

IV 

James's acceptance of the principle of com- 
pounding, in essence identical with that of 
naturalistic physics, completely destroyed, for 
him, the barrier between mind and matter, a 
barrier already considerably broken in the 
development of his philosophy of pure expe- 
rience, 1 with its insistence on the experiential 
reality of relations, and on the metaphysical 
equality of all experiential entities. It is no 
more than the acknowledgment of the onto- 
logic validity of the manyness-and-oneness 
which is the face of experience, and its salva- 
tion from the stigma of " appearance" which 
tradition, and Bergson with it, tend to attach 
to it as such. Reality is a compenetration, 
but not that complete and utter internalization 
of qualities which Bergson calls spirit. Reality 

1 Cf. Essays in Radical Empiricism, Essays III and IV. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 153 

is a multiplicity, yet not that complete and utter 
externalization of qualityless points which 
Bergson calls space and the goal of matter. 
Here and now, where things happen, in the 
region of all temporal reality without excep- 
tion, exists this many-in-one. The oneness is 
the sensible continuity of the stream of expe- 
rience. Herein every element is really next to 
its neighbors, every point of flux, a conflux, so 
that there is literally nothing between. The 
manyness are the elements which exist there, 
so continuous. 

Nothing real is absolutely simple .... every, 
smallest bit of experience is a multum in parvo plurally 
related, .... each relation is one aspect, character, 
or function, way of its being taken or way of its taking 
something else; and .... a bit of reality when actu- 
ally engaged in one of these relations is not by that very 
fact engaged in all the other relations simultaneously. 
The relations are not all what the French call solidaires 
with one another. Without losing its identity a thing 
can either take up or drop another thing. 1 

This offers us a multitude, a multiverse, 

but our multiverse still makes a "universe," for every 
part, tho it may not be in actual or immediate 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 322-23. 



154 William James and Henri Bergs on 

connexion, is nevertheless in some possible or mediated 
connexion with every other part, however remote, 
through the fact that each part hangs together with its 
next neighbors in inextricable interfusion. The type 
of union, it is true, is different from the monistic type 
of alleinheit. It is not a universal co-implication or 
integration durcheinander. It is what I call the strung- 
along type, the type of continuity, contiguity, or 
concatenation. 1 

What is remarkable about this statement is 
the extraordinary sobriety of judgment and 
clearness of vision so characteristic of James 
and so likely to cause men of lesser restraint 
and narrower insight to accuse him of incon- 
sistency. The unity and continuity here 
described are those of an utter and transitive 
nextness. They are the exact opposite of 
Bergson's unity and continuity which are the 
solidarity of compenetrating qualities, a literal 
integration durcheinander. It would seem as 
if James were logically required to pass from 
a somewhat similar solidarity in the bits of 
experience, every portion of which is somehow 
its own Hegelian other, to the similar solidarity 
of the whole. This is exactly what, under the 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 325. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 155 

compulsion of logic, Bergson does. But for 
James, such a procedure would be a fallacy of 
composition, and he insists on characterizing 
the larger units of experience as they appear, 
and on taking them at their face value. He has 
committed himself to the theory of compound- 
ing which Bergson freed him to adopt, in toto. 
The parts do retain their identity and do 
function in the wholes which they constitute 
in terms of their own unique natures, and the 
wholes again do have powers and attributes 
and efficacies not given to the parts and in no 
sense foreshadowed in them. Each must be 
taken in its individual integrity and judged 
on its own showing. Hence, the happenings, 
which constitute temporal reality, are not one 
happening, unique, indivisible, concrete, sub- 
stantial; they are truly plural and truly dis- 
crete. Inwardly complex and interpenetrative, 
with " rearward and forward looking ends/' 
they are outwardly just next each other, and 
their overflowing at their edges is not through 
and through. The relations that bind are 
external as well as internal. 



156 William James and Henri Bergs on 

Consequently, while each pulse of experience 
is an interpenetrative unity of past and 
present, a passing moment, it is only next its 
fellows and not absolutely in them. Reality 
is genuinely discrete and grows by drops. 

If a bottle had to be emptied by an infinite num- 
ber of successive decrements, it is mathematically 
impossible that the emptying should ever positively 
terminate. In point of fact, however, bottles and 
coffee-pots empty themselves by a finite number of 
decrements, each of definite amount. Either a whole 
drop emerges or nothing emerges from the spout. If 
all change went thus dropwise, so to speak, if real time 
sprouted or grew by units of duration of determinate 
amount, 1 just as our perceptions of it grow by pulses, 
there would be no Zenonian paradoxes or Kantian 
antinomies to trouble us. All our sensible experiences, 
as we get them immediately, do thus change by dis- 
crete pulses of perception, each of which keeps us saying 
"more, more, more," or "less, less, less," as the definite 
increments or diminutions make themselves felt. 2 

But is not the continuity of a reality so 
describable " really' ' discontinuity? Yes, but 
only in logic, not in fact. The discontinuity is 
consonant with the " radically pluralist, empiri- 

1 The italics are mine. 

2 Op. cit.y p. 231; cf. above, p. 44. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 157 

cist, perceptualist position, and James adopts 
it in principle, qualifying it, however, so as to 
fit it closely to perceptual experience." 1 The 
principle is that reality changes "by steps 
finite in number and discrete." The qualifi- 
cation is that such changing involves not an 
experiential but a mathematico-logical discon- 
tinuity. "The mathematical definition of con- 
tinuous quantity as 'that between any two 
elements or terms of which there is another 
term f is directly opposed to the more empirical 
or perceptual notion that anything is continu- 
ous when its parts appear as immediate next 
neighbors, with absolutely nothing between." 2 
The discontinuous, thus, is also at the same 
time continuous. The continuity is not that 
which is merely thought, or deduced, or sym- 
bolized; it is the continuity discovered and 
perceived. Here, again, the principle of com- 
pounding forced on James by experience in the 
face of ratiocination is rigorously applied. His 
empiricism shows itself once more to be radical. 

1 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 172. 

2 Ibid., p. 187. 



158 William James and Henri Bergs on 

V 

Such, then, is the structure of reality con- 
sidered in its nearness and intimacy. Is it 
characterized by a prepotent order or a duality 
of orders? Does it, as a whole, contain a 
dominant stuff, or substance? Again, to say 
so would be to commit the fallacy of compo- 
sition. With respect to order, experience as 
a whole presents itself as a chaos or quasi- 
chaos, i.e., a much-at-once. Its constitution 
appears to be, at least, non-rational, and there 
is to be found 

no good warrant for ever suspecting the existence of 
any reality of a higher denomination than that dis- 
tributed and strung along and flowing sort of reality 
we finite beings swim in. 1 .... No more of reality 
collected together at once is extant anywhere perhaps, 
than in my experience of reading this page, or in yours 

of listening Sensational experiences are their 

"own others" .... both internally and externally. 
Inwardly they are one with their parts, and outwardly 
they pass continuously into their next neighbors, so 
that events separated by years of time in a man's life 
hang together unbrokenly by intermediary events. 2 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 213. 
2 Ibid., p. 285. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 159 

We are, it would seem, only warranted in 

concluding that 

experience as a whole is a process of time, whereby 
innumerable particular terms lapse and are super- 
seded by others that follow upon them by transitions 
which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in content, 
are themselves experiences, and must in general be 
accounted at least as real as the terms which they 
relate The whole system .... as immedi- 
ately given presents itself as a quasi-chaos through 
which one can pass out of an initial term in many 
directions and yet end in the same terminus, moving 
from next to next by a great many possible paths. 1 

Again, 

there is vastly more discontinuity in the sum total of 
experiences than we commonly suppose. The objec- 
tive nucleus of every man's experience, his own body, is, 
it is true, a continuous percept; and equally continu- 
ous as a percept (though we may be inattentive to it) 
is the material environment of that body, changing 
by gradual transition w T hen the body moves. But the 
distant parts of the physical world are at all times 
absent from us, and form conceptual objects merely, 
into the perceptual reality of which our life inserts 
itself at points discrete and relatively rare. Round 
their several objective nuclei, partly shared and com- 
mon and partly discrete, of the real physical world, 
innumerable thinkers, pursuing their several lines of 
physically true cogitation, trace paths that intersect 

1 Essays in Radical\Enipiricism, p. 134. 



160 William James and Henri Bergson 

one another only at discontinuous perceptual points, 
and the rest of the time are quite incongruent; and 
around all the nuclei of shared "reality" .... floats 
the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly subjec- 
tive, that are non-substitutional, that find not even an 
eventual ending for themselves in the perceptual world 
— the mere day-dreams and joys and sufferings and 
wishes of the individual minds. They exist with one 
another, indeed, and with the objective nuclei; but, out 
of them, it is probable that to all eternity no interre- 
lated system of any kind will ever be made. 1 

The world is radically a pluralism, existence 
is piecemeal, and " piecemeal existence is inde- 
pendent of complete collectibility Some 

facts at any rate exist only distributively, or 
in form of a set of eaches, which (even if in 
infinite number) need not in any intelligible 
sense either experience themselves or get experi- 
enced by anything else, as members of an All." 
Metaphysical and experiential beings are, 
we may conclude, coincident with respect to 
order. There is neither monism nor dualism 
nor alternation of two orders. There are 
just terms and relations, conjunctive and 
disjunctive. The multiverse is discrete and 
radically plural. Reality is externally related. 

1 Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 65, 66. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 161 

Everything you can think of, however vast or 
inclusive, has .... a genuinely " external" envi- 
ronment of some sort or amount. Things are "with" 
one another in many ways, but nothing includes every- 
thing, or dominates over everything. The word " and " 
trails along after every sentence. Something always 
escapes. "Ever not quite" has to be said of the best 
attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining 
all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is thus more 
like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom. 
However much may be collected, however much may 
report itself as present at any effective centre of con- 
sciousness or action, something is self-governed and 
absent and unreduced to unity. 1 

Moreover, metaphysical is coincident with 
experiential being not alone in its discrete- 
ness, but in its continuity. The latter is 
constituted by " positively conjunctive transi- 
tion." This involves neither chasm nor leap. 

Being the very original of what we mean by con- 
tinuity, it makes a continuum wherever it appears. 
Our fields of experience have no more definite bound- 
aries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed 
forever by a more that continuously develops, and that 
continuously supersedes them as life proceeds. 2 .... 

Life is in the transition as much as in the terms 
connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 321, 322. 

2 Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 70, 71. 



162 William James and Henri Bergs on 

emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were 
the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line 
of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which 
the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live 
prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is "of" 
the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly by the past's 
continuation; it is "of" the future in so far as the 
future, when it comes, will have continued it. 1 

Reality is a mosaic in which the pieces cling 
together by their edges, the transitions between 
them forming their cement. From this mosaic 
no experiential entity is excluded. Particu- 
larly, time is harmoniously copresent with 
space, and conversely. There is no ontological 
alternation or substitution of one for the other 
as in the Bergsonian account, no difference by 
the presence or absence of extension. 2 

Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in 
its parts, is that of things conjunct and separated. 
The great continua of time, space, and the self envelop 
everything betwixt them, and flow together without 
interfering. 3 The things that they envelop come as 
separate in some ways and as continuous in others. 
Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and others 

1 Essays of Radical Empiricism, p. 87. 

2 Ibid. , p. 31. 

3 Ibid., pp. 94-95. The italics are mine. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 163 

are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one space 

or exclude each other from it In all this the 

continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely co- 
ordinate matters of immediate feeling And the 

feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simul- 
taneous feeling of novelty. 

In all this, again, the unity or continuity is 
that of " concatenation/' not of " consolida- 
tion." "The world hangs together from 
next to next in a variety of ways, so that when 
you are off one thing you can always be onto 
something else without ever dropping out of 
your world." 1 

As there is no dominant and prevailing order 
in reality, but a compenetration and a conflict 
of all orders, so also there is no dominant and 
prevailing substance. The stuff of reality is 
whatever it appears to be — "that, just what 
appears, space, intensity, flatness, heaviness, 
brownness, whatnot." "There is no general 
stuff of which experience at large is made. 
There are as many stuffs as there are ' natures ' 
in the things experienced." 2 Particularly is 

1 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 31. 

2 Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 26, 27. 



164 William James and Henri Bergson 

it to be denied that there exists any such special 
order of dominations as mind and matter, 
taken metaphysically — and Bergson so takes 
them. " There is .... no aboriginal stuff 
or quality of being, contrasted with that of 
which material objects are made, out of which 
our thoughts of them are made." 1 There is 
no " impalpable inner flowing" given as an 
immediate consciousness of consciousness itself. 2 
There is no inextension : 

Descartes for the first time defined thought as the 
absolutely unextended, and later philosophers have 
accepted the description as correct. But what possible 
meaning has it to say that, when we think of a foot- 
rule or a square yard, extension is not attributable to 
our thought ? Of every extended object, the adequate 
mental picture must have all the extension of the object 
itself. The difference between objective and sub- 
jective extension is one of relation to a context solely. 
In the mind the various extents maintain no necessarily 
stubborn order relatively to each other, while in the 
physical world they bound each other stably, and 
added together, make the real enveloping Unit which 
we believe in and call real Space. As " outer" they 
carry themselves adversely, so to speak, to one another, 

1 Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 3. 

2 Ibid., p. 6. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 165 

exclude one another, and maintain their distances; 
while as " inner" their order is loose and they form 

a durcheinander in which the unity is lost 

The two worlds differ, not by the presence or absence 
of extension, but by the relations of the extensions 
which in both worlds exist. 1 

Bergson, observing the same data, identifies 
the relations with the substance and rules 
extension out of the mental world altogether. 
James goes by the facts. For him there is no 
intuition of thought " flowing as life within us, 
in absolute contrast with the objects which it 
so unremittingly escorts." 2 There is no mind- 
stuff, there is no matter. There are only 
thoughts in the concrete and there are things, 
and thoughts in the concrete are made of the 
same sort of stuff as things are. Even affec- 
tional facts, valuations, emotions, and so on 
indefinitely, do not belong to one realm exclu- 
sively, but are by usage determined now to 
this place, now to that. 

If " physical" and " mental" meant two different 
kinds of intrinsic nature immediately, intuitively, and 

1 Ibid., pp. 30, 31; cf. also A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 253, 
254, cited in chap. ii. 

Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 36. 



1 66 William James and Henri Bergson 

infallibly discernible, and each fixed forever in what- 
ever bit of experience it qualified, one does not see how 
there could ever have arisen any room for doubt or 
ambiguity. But, if, on the contrary, these words are 
words of sorting, ambiguity is natural. For then, as 
soon as the relations of a thing are sufficiently various, 
it can be sorted variously. Take a mass of carrion, 
for example, and the " disgustingness " which for us 
is part of the experience. The sun caresses it, and the 
zephyrs woo it as if it were a bed of roses. So the dis- 
gustingness fails to operate within the realm of suns 
and breezes — it does not function as a physical quality. 
But the carrion " turns our stomach" by what seems a 
direct operation — it does function physically, there- 
fore, in that limited part of physics. We can take it 
as physical or as non-physical according as we take it 
in the narrower or wider context, and conversely, of 
course, we must treat it as non-mental or as mental. 

Our body itself is the primary instance of the 
ambiguous. Sometimes I treat my body purely as 
a part of outer nature. Sometimes, again, I think 
of it as "mine," I sort it with the "me," and then 
certain local changes and determinations in it pass for 
spiritual happenings. Its breathing is my " thinking," 
its sensorial adjustments are my " attention," its 
kinaesthetic alterations are my "efforts," its visceral 
perturbations are my "emotions." The obstinate 
controversies that have arisen over such statements 
as these .... prove how hard it is to decide by bare 
introspection what it is in experiences that shall make 
them either spiritual or material. It surely can be 
nothing intrinsic in the individual experience. It is 



Intuition and Pragmatism 167 

their way of behaving toward each other, their system 
of relations, their function; and all these things vary 
with the context in which we find it opportune to 
consider them. 

Empirically and radically then, " there is 
no original spirituality or materiality of being, 
intuitively discerned." 1 

Even concepts, secondary formations though 
they are, in substance less than, and in the 
functions, additive to, the experiential flux, are 
not of another and different metaphysical 
status. Their stuff is like that of the residual 
reality. They are the " natures" in the things 
experienced, and their being is an act that is 
part of the flux of feeling, while their meanings 
are part of the concrete disjunctions and dis- 
cretenesses which diversify that same flux. 2 
They too have the many-and-oneness which 
comes in every instance of experience, and are 
as real as percepts. Percepts and they " inter- 
penetrate and melt together, impregnate and 
fertilize each other. Neither, taken alone, 

1 Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 148, 152-54. 

2 Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 48. 



/ 



1 68 William James and Henri Bergson 

knows reality in its completeness. We need 
them both, as we need both of our legs to walk 
with." 1 Percepts and concepts are consub- 
stantial. 

They are made of the same kind of stuff, and melt 
into each other when we handle them together. How 
could it be otherwise when the concepts are like 
evaporations out of the bosom of perception, into 
which they condense again whenever practical service 
summons them ? No one can tell, of the things he now 
holds in his hands and reads, how much comes in 
through his eyes and fingers, and how much, from his 
apperceiving intellect, unites with that and makes of 
it this particular "book." The universal and the par- 
ticular parts of experience are literally immersed in 
each other, and both are indispensable. Conception 
is not like a painted hook, on which no real chain can 
be hung; for we hang concepts upon percepts, and 
percepts upon concepts, interchangeably and indefi- 
nitely The world we practically live in is one 

in which it is impossible, except by theoretic retro- 
spection, to disentangle the contributions of intellect 
from those of sense Intellectual reverbera- 
tions enlarge and prolong the perceptual experience 
which they envelop, associating it with the remoter 
parts of existence. And the ideas of these in turn 
work like those resonators that pick out partial tones 

Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 52, 53. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 169 

in complex sounds. They help us to decompose our 
percept into parts and to abstract and isolate its 
elements. 1 

In sum, for James, the fundamental fact is 
the immediate experience taken at its face 
value. As such it is a much-at-once, contain- 
ing terms and relations, continuities and dis- 
cretenesses, inextricably mingled. There exists 
a real compounding, so that the empirical 
individual data, both those that are substantive 
and those that are transitive, maintain their 
identities and yet compose larger wholes, 
present at the same time and in the same way : 
wholes which are truly wholes and exhibit new 
characteristics neither implied by nor other- 
wise foreshadowed in the aboriginal elements 
of which these wholes are composed. And 
all of these, although they must be taken 
temporally, are absolutely co-ordinate matters 
of being, there existing no one dominant 
order, no one dominant substance, but a con- 
geries and aggregate of " natures" and orders, 
metaphysically the peers one of the other. 

1 Ibid., pp. 107, 108. 



170 William James and Henri Bergson 

VI 

The divergence of this insight, which is the 
insight of radical empiricism (an insight which 
does take reality at its face value, absolutely 
without reservations), from the philosophic 
tradition, both the "empirical" and "rational- 
ist" are patent. Patent also must be its con- 
trast with the Bergsonian philosophy. From 
that, indeed, its difference extends still more 
deeply. It reaches out to those perceptions 
which both great thinkers have so vigorously 
defended against the enemy, and concerning 
the reality of which they are unanimous. 
Those are the perceptions of activity, of free- 
dom, of novelty, of causation. By Bergson, 
these terms are practically equated one with 
the other, and finally identified with elan vital 
and duree reelle. To his thinking, they are, 
in a word, simply different symbols designating 
his fundamental metaphysical intuition — real 
duration, spirit, life. To James they stand 
for distinct experiential data, coimplicative 
perhaps, but not identical one with the other, 
and certainly not identical with a predomi- 
nating metaphysical substance. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 171 

Taken in its broadest sense any apprehension of 

something doing, is an experience of activity 

Mere, restless, zig-zag movement, or a wild Ideen- 
flucht or Rhapsodie der Wahrnehmung, as Kant would 
say, would constitute an active from an inactive 

world The word " activity' ' has no imaginable 

content whatever save these experiences of process, 
obstruction, strivings, strain, or release, ultimate 
qualia as they are of the life given us to be known. 1 

And that is all. James denies categorically 
that he maintains "a metaphysical principle of 
activity. " There is no pragmatic need nor 
aesthetic justification of one. 2 Now these 
experiences of activity, " ultimate qualia" as 
they are of life, are all experiences of activity 
and of nothing more; they are not all expe- 
riences of freedom and of novelty. These last 
words mean that what happens in the world is 
not pure repetition, which would still be 
activity, but that each fresh situation comes 
"with an original touch." But the "original 
touch" does not imply a "principle of free will," 
for what could it do, "except rehearse the 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 377; Some Problems of Philoso- 
phy, p. 212. 

2 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 391, note. 



172 William James and Henri Bergs on 

phenomenon beforehand" P 1 It implies simply 
that in some respect the future is not coimplica- 
tive with the past, that there are real and utterly 
unforeseeable disjunctive additions with nothing 
to link them "save what the words 'plus/ 'with/ 
or 'and' stand for"; that, to use James's famil- 
iar metaphor, reality grows by drops; that 
future and past are discrete, that activities are 
plural and not one. 

So James is not involved in that Eleatic- 
Heracleitan admixture, which is character- 
istic at once of neo-Platonism and Bergsonian 
temporalism. For to the latter the poussee 
formidable is given all at once and once for 
all, and it is an act continuous and indivisible 
and substantial, of which the discrete actions of 
experience, all the activities designated and 
enumerated by James, are but spatial corrup- 
tions and deteriorations. Creation is indi- 
viduation of the unindividual, under the shock 



t A Pluralistic Universe, p. 392. That is really what Berg- 
son's duree reelle does, since in it everything is somehow fore- 
shadowed and prepared for, though not predetermined. Change 
is a sort of explication of the implicit or exteriorization of the 
internal. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 173 

or opposition of matter. Duration is somewhat 
different from this creation, for it requires that 
the past shall be both altered and unaltered in 
an internal and through-and-through addition, 
which is not altogether an addition, to the "tem- 
poral extent" already given. Genuine chance 
is precluded from such a reality, although 
unf oreseeability, and freedom in the Spinozistic 
sense of the word, alteration that springs out 
of the total nature of the elan are not. Con- 
tingency does not reside in the elan itself; it 
resides in the matter on which it acts. The elan 
would still have diversified in the direction of 
intelligence and of instinct, even though the 
particular natural energy of which it made use 
were not carbonaceous, and hence no men and 
no bees and no ants were formed. The ca- 
pacity for them would, of course, still reside 
in it as a foreshadowing tension; it would 
simply not have been corrupted toward exten- 
sion by means of carbon. 

Such considerations are, however, entirely 
foreign to James's views of chance or con- 
tingency. For him contingency is real here 



174 William James and Henri Bergson 

and now, and chance is genuine immediately. 
In this view, activity becomes co-ordinate and 
equivalent with causation, as freedom and 
chance do with novelty. Now causation, 
concretely taken, involves for James, as for 
Bergson, something dramatic, a sustaining of a 
felt purpose against felt obstacles, and over- 
coming or being overcome. The content 
of "sustaining" is what it is "known-as," 
nothing more. It is not the rejection of 
either "final" or "efficient" causation by a 
tertium quid, but (at least in our personal 
activities which we most readily experience) 
the coalescence of both as activity. Such a 
coalescence is durational. Something persists. 
But also something is lost, and something is 
gained. 

The activity sets up more effects than it proposes 
literally. The end is defined beforehand in most cases 
only as a general direction, along which all sorts of 
novelties and surprises lie in wait. 1 

The novelties and surprises are utter and 
complete. 

1 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 213. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 175 

In every series of real terms, not only do the terms 
themselves and their environment change, but we 
change, and their meaning for us changes, so that new 
kinds of sameness and types of causation continually 
come into view and appeal to our interest. Our 
earlier lines, having grown irrelevant, are then dropped. 
The old terms can no longer be substituted nor the 
relations "transferred/' because of so many new di- 
mensions into which experience has opened 

Professor Bergson, believing as he does in a Heracleitan 
devenir reel, ought, if I rightly understand him, posi- 
tively to deny that in the actual world the logical 
axioms hold good without qualification. Not only, 
according to him, do terms change, so that after a 
certain time the very elements of things are no longer 
what they were, but relations also change, so as no 
longer to obtain in the same identical way between the 
new things that have succeeded upon the old ones. If 
this were really so, then however indefinitely sames 
might be substituted for sames in the logical world of 
nothing but pure sameness, in the world of real opera- 
tions every line of sameness actually started and 
followed up would eventually give out and cease to be 
traceable farther. Sames of the same in such a world 
will not always (or rather, in a strict sense, will never) 
be the same as one another, for in such a world there is 
no literal or ideal sameness among numerical differents. 
Nor in such a world will it be true that the cause of the 
cause is unreservedly the cause of the effect, for if we 
follow the line of real causation, instead of contenting 
ourselves with Hume's and Kant's eviscerated sche- 
matism, we find that remoter effects are seldom aimed 



176 William James and Henri Bergson 

at by causal intentions, that no one kind of causal 
activity continues indefinitely. 1 

Professor Bergson, though of course he ought 
to, does not believe anything of the sort, 
since the Heracleitan devenir reel is not so real 
to him as the Plotinian duration, which is also 
eternity, 2 and since the continuity, indivisibility, 
and substantiality of that transcendental and 
metaphysical change which is real duration, 
vital impulse, creative evolution, preclude 
utterly just these empirical descriptions of 
how change and activity do go on and 
novelties do arise. His critique of intellect- 
ualism, indeed, points to a recognition of the 
purely empirical character of change, but 
this is always incidental, and underneath it 
always stands the firm assumption of the 
unity of duration, of its diversification into 
the two inverse movements of spirit, and of 
the composition of the world of actual expe- 
rience by the confrontation of these two 
forces. 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 397, 398. 

3 Cf . Introduction a la metaphysique, and supra. 



Intuition and Pragmatism 177 

The main outlines of Bergson's thought are 
the main outlines of all transcendentalism. 
The main outlines of James's thought are not 
prefigured in the history of philosophy. Seek- 
ing to build no system, not even an eclectic 
one, he organizes no material in any particular 
way. He speaks of pragmatism as a mediator 
between rationalism and empiricism, monism 
and pluralism. He accepts apriorities in 
thought when they confirm themselves empiri- 
cally as such; and he rejects dogmas when they 
do not so confirm themselves. 1 His alliances 
with traditional empiricism are not stronger 
than his alliances with traditional idealism. 
His ultimate alignment must be, as he himself 
points out, with realism. " Radical empiricism 
.... has more affinities with natural realism 
than with the views of Berkeley or of Mill." 2 
Indeed it is naive or logical realism* freed from 

1 Cf . Principles of Psychology, II, chap, xxviii. 

2 Radical Empiricism, p. 76. 

3 Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 106: "What I am affirm- 
ing here is the platonic doctrine that concepts are singulars, that 
concept-stuff is inalterable, and that physical realities are con- 
stituted by the various concept-stuffs of which they 'partake.' 
It is known as 'logical realism' in the history of philosophy; and 



178 William James and Henri Bergs on 

intellectualistic bias, and restored to that 
integrity and impartiality of insight which is 
the source of all that is systematic or domina- 
tive in philosophic perception. 

has usually been more favored by rationalistic than by empiricist 
minds. For rationalism, concept-stuff is primordial, and percep- 
tual things are secondary in nature. The present book, which 
treats concrete percepts as primordial and concepts as of second- 
ary origin, may be regarded as somewhat eccentric in its 
attempt to combine logical realism with otherwise empiricist 
mode of thought.' ' 



CHAPTER V 

DIVINITY, ITS NATURE AND ITS ROLE IN 
HUMAN AFFAIRS 

Is there, or can there be, in a world such as 
James sees, place for superhuman spirits, for 
the gods, for God ? 

In our biographies, essentially a sensational 
flux, chaotic, multiform, overrich in orders, 
this world makes of our minds 

at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. 
Consciousness [in the revised and only acceptable sense 
of the term, i.e., in the sense of a specific sort of rela- 
tion] consists in the comparison of these with each 
other, the selection of some and the suppression of the 
rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of atten- 
tion. The highest and most elaborate mental products 
are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next 
beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below 
that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger 
amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, 
in short, works on the data it receives, very much as 
a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the 
statue stood there from all eternity. But there were 
a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor 
alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the 

179 



180 William James and Henri Bergson 

rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever differ- 
ent our several views of it may be, all lay imbedded 
in the primordial chaos of sensations which gave the 
mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. 
We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things 
back to that black and jointless continuity of space 
and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science 
calls the only real world. But all the while, the world 
we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and 
we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extri- 
cated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting 
certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, 
other statues from the same stone! Other minds, 
other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpres- 
sive chaos! My world is but one of a million alike 
imbedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. 
How different must be the worlds in the mind of eel, 
cuttle-fish, or crab! 1 

Different, but equally real! The insistent 
metaphysical democratism dominates the 
province of pure psychology also. And it is 
from this that it reaches finally to the ultimate 
walls of the world. For the psychological 
region is the region of appreciation and judg- 
ment, par excellence, and judgment and appre- 
ciation would never be made if there were no 
life to conserve, no environment to adapt, no 

1 Principles of Psychology, I, 288-89. 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 181 

chaos to organize for the sake of that life. If, 
then, interest compels us to select and selection 
generates practice and practice molds our 
originally plastic and indifferent alertness into 
habit, gradually reducing the give-and-take 
of our characters, hardening them into fixed 
orders and definitely articulate processes, is 
there not reason to believe that a similar con- 
summation goes on in every entity that exists, 
living or inert, conscious or torpid ? Each has 
the same passive resistance to change, each 
offers similarly a certain active response to envi- 
ronment, each determines its environment, be it 
ever so little, with reference to itself as center, 
and from its own view carves out a world. 
The foot molds itself to the shoe as much as 
the shoe to the foot, the road and the driver 
to the automobile as much as the automobile 
to the driver and the road. We see habits form- 
ing everywhere — everywhere an original for- 
eignness and plasticity, everywhere a growing 
intimacy and interaccommodation and harden- 
ing; everywhere diversity passing into union 
and union into novel differentiations bred by 



182 William James and Henri Bergs on 

the very habit which is this union. If, then, 
we take the evolutionary hypothesis radically 
enough, we see a struggle for survival, an 
activity of selection, a constant unification 
by adaptation, and a diversification by spon- 
taneous variation, throughout the entire range 
of being. The universe, in a word, is tychistic. 
Chance is real in it. Destruction is as possible 
as salvation, and evil is as actual as good. 
What is central is the fact that evil and good 
are relations, and not substances, that each 
entity which struggles can of itself and in its 
own right contribute to the everlasting damna- 
tion or eternal salvation of the world. There 
is no eternal law; there is no over-arching 
destiny, no all-compelling Providence. Law 
itself is no more than cosmic habit, a modus 
vivendi, which things that have come together 
by chance, and are staying together by choice, 
have worked out as men work out communal 
customs facilitating contacts. Whether gravi- 
tation or tobacco-smoking, there is a difference 
in scope, not in history! And the spontane- 
ous individualities whose collective habits the 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 183 

"laws of nature" express are greater and more 
real than those laws. These individualities 
in their privacy and inwardness are reals in the 
completest sense of the term, and through 
them the axis of larger being runs. How 
otherwise should the history of the cosmos 
unfold itself ? How be read ? 



If ... . one takes the theory of evolution radically, 
one ought to apply it not only to the rock-strata, the 
animals, and the plants, but to the stars, to the chemical 
elements, to the laws of nature. There must have been 
a far-off antiquity, one is then tempted to suppose, 
when things were really chaotic. Little by little, and 
out of the haphazard possibilities of that time, a few 
connected things and habits arose, and the rudiments 
of regular performance began. Every variation in the 
way of law and order added itself to this nucleus, which 
inevitably grew more considerable as history went on; 
while the aberrant and inconstant variations, not being 
similarly preserved, disappeared from being, wandered 
off as unrelated vagrants, or else remained so imper- 
fectly connected with the part of the world that had 
grown regular as only to manifest their existence by 

occasional lawless intrusions Wisps and shreds 

of the original chaos, they would be connected enough 
with the cosmos to affect its periphery now and then, 
as by a momentary whiff or touch or gleam, but not 
enough ever to be followed up and hunted down and 



184 William James and Henri Bergson 

bagged. Their relation to the cosmos would be 
tangential solely. 1 

Superhuman minds are, clearly, not impos- 
sible in a world like this. They are admissible 
ab origine; they are admissible as evolutionary 
growths or as spontaneous variations. Their 
naturalness in reality is not in question: what 
is in question is their nature. What is their 
specific nature? What is their status? Do 
they belong to the steadily consolidating 
co-operative cosmos, or are they tangential, 
momentary whiffs and touches? Do they 
work ? and good ? or ill ? How do they enter 
the world's natural constitution, keeping single 
the field of experience and the cosmos unsplit 
into a realm of nature and a realm of grace ? 
What difference do they make in that consti- 
tution? How would it be otherwise, if they 
did not exist ? 

Since, at least for us human beings, reality 
resides in the parts more deeply and finally 
than in the whole, since the immediacies of 
experience, of the here and now, are in the pro- 

1 Memories and Studies, pp. 192, 193. 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 185 

foundest sense the models of whatever other 
organizations of the real we choose to pursue, 
it is clear that superhuman consciousnesses 
must attach themselves in their own way to 
our individual lives, as do all the objects that 
interest selects out of the chaos to transvalue 
into a cosmos. Now these things, James finds, 
are what religious objects do supremely, and 
the inward life itself seems never so near reality 
as in religious experience. "By being religious 
we establish ourselves in possession of ulti- 
mate reality at the only points at which reality 
is given us to guard," 1 and religion, hence, 
"occupying herself with personal destinies and 
keeping thus in contact with the only absolute 
realities we know, must necessarily play a part 
in human history." 2 So far as mankind is 
concerned, then, the religious object is integral 
to the human cosmos. Whether the gods be 
tangential to the world in its democratic 
indifference or no, they are not tangential to 
the destiny of man and must ever belong to 

1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 501. 

2 Ibid., p. 503. 



1 86 William James and Henri Bergson 

that one of the equally real millions of worlds 
which we carve out, for the sake of our interests 
and the filling of our needs, from the boundless 
sensational flux. 

The gods reside, then, at least to our belief, 
far down with those depths of feeling which 
are the core of our reality and the very seat 
and go of what is individual and personal, or 
what is real. But this residence is not suffi- 
cient to establish their status. Tables and 
chairs, number-systems, fairies, and vain imagi- 
nings reside there, too. Concepts have a fire- 
side corner in that inwardness. It is itself 
multifold and chaotic, and the order of its being 
as various as the strands that comprise it. The 
gods may be, like concepts, consubstantial with 
percepts, with actual tables and tangible chairs, 
and still be derivative and secondary functions, 
mere meanings whose whole significance is in 
their prophetic outcome, not in their active 
and individuate being. Indeed, the reality 
of the concept "God" is just such afunctional 
reality, the reality of a tendency in our private 
natures, of a "faith-state," rather than of 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 187 

a living impelment in an independent object, 
existing by the primacy of its own will, main- 
taining that existence by its own force, and 
claiming it as its own metaphysical right. 
Such an existence would not be truly indi- 
vidual and real. It would be a member but 
not an efficacy in the cosmos. Its force would 
be the force of the human personality which 
bred it, its place the place which that person- 
ality assigned it. Not quite tangential, neither 
would it be altogether integral in the cosmos. 
Its position would be peripheral without being 
beyond the reach of the influences radiating 
from the center. 

The locus of the gods or of God is, however, 
much more nearly central than that, and their 
reality is profoundly more solid. Infrequently 
though, and at the cost of however much order 
and peace, they do appear; their reality, when 
it does reveal itself, reveals itself in ways over- 
mastering. Perceived essentially not other- 
wise than our fellows and things are perceived, 
they operate, through our perception of them, 
the transvaluation of all our values, the 



1 88 William James and Henri Bergson 

reconstruction and reordering of our private 
worlds. It then seems as if we were the chisels 
and they sculptors, and the systems they carve 
with and for and through us seem infinitely 
righter and better than those we had carved 
for ourselves. They renew the heavens, they 
renew the earth, they renew the human heart. 

Their mode of renewal is not yet well studied. 
Its existence is established, its strongest fea- 
tures are known, its operations are explicable. 
It is not an interruption of the world's order, 
but a reassurance and continuation of it. The 
science of the psychologist may, within narrow 
limits, exhibit and analyze it. But its outcome 
escapes except in works. 

Concretely, the mode is knowledge-of- 
acquaintance. But its content is so enor- 
mously ineffable that the directness and 
immediacy of apprehension which constitutes 
its psychologic nature is overshadowed by this 
other quality. It is commonly regarded not 
as a knowledge at all, but as a mystery. There 
is sufficient reason for such a regard, seeing 
that the powers of perception which touch and 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 189 

apprehend it are not those of daily use, and 
that their activity, indeed, often requires the 
suspension of those in daily use. Massive 
somatic reflexes seem often at work; the 
" higher centers" seem independently energetic. 
There is implicated, in a word, a condition of 
neural tension in which the customary modes 
of discharge, on the ordinary levels of sensa- 
tion and perception, have somehow been 
abolished — perhaps through anesthetics, per- 
haps through ritual and purificatory exercises, 
perhaps through no known natural cause — or 
have not yet re-established themselves. Con- 
sciousness, the while, is present and reaches 
into regions not comparable with the known 
ones of the daily life. This consciousness 
seems deeper, seems to reside on levels lower 
down and more extensive than those of the self 
of waking life, to reside on " subconscious " 
levels, and there it appears to be preternaturally 
alert and explicit. What it is awake to and 
apprehends is, by report which as little as 
anything else in the world is open to question, 
spirit. And in the apprehension of this spirit 



190 William James and Henri Bergson 

consists the mystic experience. 1 This expe- 
rience is multifold in its objects and manifes- 
tations, 2 exceedingly varied in its consequences 
and complicated in its connections, as full of 
contradictions and enmities reconciled and 
active as is the sensory flux. "They do not 
contradict these facts [already objectively 
before us] as such or deny anything that our 
senses have immediately seized. 5 ' 3 They are 
additive to the rest of experience, their effect 
being revaluative, not transubstantiative. They 
enter through a region in our nature 

that is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it is 
the abode of everything that is latent and the reservoir 
of everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved. 
It contains, for example, such things as all our momen- 
tarily inactive memories, and it harbors the springs 
of all our obscurely motived passions, impulses, likes, 
dislikes, and prejudices. Our intuitions, hypotheses, 
fancies, superstitions, persuasions, convictions, and, in 
general, all our non-rational operations come from it. 
It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they 
may return to it. In it arise whatever mystical expe- 
riences we may have, and our automatisms, sensory 

1 Cf. Varieties of Religious Experience, chapter on "Mysti- 
cism/' particularly pp. 504-6. 

2 Ibid., p. 425. 3 Ibid., p. 427. 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 191 

or motor; our life in hypnotic and "hypnoid" condi- 
tions, if we are subject to such conditions; our delu- 
sions, fixed ideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are 
hysteric subjects; our supranormal cognitions if such 
there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It is also 
the fountainhead of much that feeds our religion. In 
persons deep in the religious life, as we have abundantly 
seen, .... the door into this region seems unusually 
wide open; at any rate, experiences making their 
entrances through that door have had emphatic influ- 
ence in shaping religious history. 1 

Spirit then, pours into the daily life through 
the funnel of the subconscious, and in a fellow- 
ship which prejudices its acknowledgment and 
does it otherwise no good. But be its fellow- 
ship the most favorable and commending, it 
must still "be sifted and tested and run the 
gauntlet of confrontation with the total context 
of experience, just like what comes from the 
outer world of sense." Such sifting and test- 
ing reveals that it may be evil and diabolical, 
the enemy of life; as well as good and divine, 
the conserving friend of life. 2 It wears, in a 
word, the same significance for our interests 
as the other entities of experience, and is not 

1 Ibid. , pp. 483, 484. 2 Ibid,, p. 426. 



192 William James and Henri Bergson 

confined to being merely propitious. It has 
a nature and destiny of its own, and its bearing 
toward humanity, like the bearing of men 
toward each other, may in no small degree be 
determined by mankind's bearing toward the 
destiny of such supranormal spirits. The 
relation of the two is moral; there is, empiri- 
cally, a conventional give-and-take. The 
" mystic" behaves otherwise than an environ- 
ment not containing spirit would require. 
He acknowledges its actual presence, he seeks 
union or harmonious relations with it as his 
true end, and, in his contact with it, in prayer 
or inner communion, "work is really done, and 
spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, 
psychological or material, within the phe- 
nomenal world." And all this at just these 
points where reality is felt at its glowing fulness 
of force and presence, in the concrete imme- 
diacy of individual experience as such. There, 
in all religious experience, among all peoples, 
in all times, in all places, the individual 
"becomes conscious that .... [this] higher 
part is conterminous and continuous with a 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 193 

more of the same quality, which is operative 
in the universe outside of him, and which he 
can keep in working touch with and in a 
fashion get on board of, and save himself when 
all his lower being has gone to pieces in the 
wreck." 

There underlies here the assumption that 
the "more" and the mystic have a common 
aim, in so far forth, and the assurance that 
they are of identical substance. Concerning 
the specific nature of this substance there is 
disagreement. Some find just a "stream of 
ideal tendency," others genuine and differing 
personalities; but all find it dynamic, dynamo- 
genie, efficacious. Subtract the quarrels of 
creeds and schools, and what remains is "lit- 
erally and objectively true " and "what remains' ' 
is this: "the conscious person is continuous 
with a wider self through which saving expe- 
riences come," continuous without being deper- 
sonalized, coactive without being absorbed. 
The relation is external as well as internal. 
Religion in the strict sense of the term is an 
empirical instance of the "compounding of 



194 William James and Henri Bergs on 

consciousness" which we saw to be so central 
in the Jamesian apprehension of reality. 1 

These unhuman, superior, and saving con- 
sciousnesses are of course finite, and certainly 
not reducible to one. The facts exhibit a 
"supernaturalism" which is not universalistic, 
but " piecemeal/' and whatever the power or 
the status of the supranormal spirits, they live 
in an environment with which they must cope 
even as man must with his, and they too work 
for a salvation which has the chance of being 
lost as well as attained. Men and gods may 
be fellow-soldiers in a struggle to banish evil 
from the world, to make reality over into a 
complete cosmos. Whatever the extent of the 
world may be, gods, not otherwise than men, 
are less than it. Both empirically and dia- 
lectically, there is a residuum which is differ- 
ent and additive, with which gods must cope 
as man does. And in this struggle, men may 
help gods perhaps as much as gods help men. 
"Who knows whether the faithfulness of indi- 
viduals here below to their own poor over- 

1 Supra, chaps, ii and iv. 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 195 

beliefs, may not actually help God in turn to 
be more effectively faithful to his own greater 
tasks ?" x 

From the standpoint of radical empiricism, 
then, in a world having the history and the 
constitution the world of radical empiricism 
shows itself to possess, superhuman conscious- 
ness is not merely not ruled out by hypothesis; 
it is established by experience as immediate 
and as coercive as any other experience men 
base deductions on. It is additive to the rou- 
tinal content of the daily life, but integrally 
additive; no momentary whiff or touch; enter- 
ing the normal constitution of the world by 
way of the "subliminal" self, and working 
through it both evil and good, but chiefly 
good. And this conclusion is born of no dia- 
lectical analysis, no syllogistic deduction. It 
is an inductive summary of recorded fact. 

Quite the contrary in the Bergsonian phi- 
losophy. Bergson nowhere directly faces the 
problems put by religious experience as such, 
nor does he consider that the content of 

1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 519. 



196 William James and Henri Bergson 

religious emotion is different from the content 
revealed in the intuition of anything moving 
and active. Of the uniqueness, the persistence, 
and the significance of the " religious senti- 
ment" he is convinced. It belongs to the 
profundities of our nature. The ideas in 
religion, on the contrary, are external. One 
gives way to another; none endures. 1 They 
are mere symbols of a deeper thing. But is 
this deeper thing "God"? Is it a "more" 
like ourselves from which men may draw, 
in their need, aid and comfort? A thing 
warm and intimate and personal, in the 
human sense of "personal" ? One can hardly 
say so. 

The considerations [writes Bergson in a letter to 
a friend 2 ] set forth in my " essay' ' on the immediate 
data of consciousness are intended to bring to light 
the fact of liberty; those in Matter and Memory touch 
upon the reality of spirit; those in Creative Evolution 
present creation as a fact. From all this, there clearly 
emerges the idea of a God, creator and free; the gen- 
erator at once of matter and of life, whose creative 
efforts as regards life are continued through the evo- 

1 Cf. Charpin, La question religieuse. 

2 Printed by E. LeRoy in line philosophie nouvelle. 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 197 

lution of species and the constitution of human per- 
sonalities. 

Such a god is a totality. That his nature 
is spiritual need not be argued. But his spirit 
is not the spirit which is manifest in the daily 
life. The daily life is spatial and this spirit is 
disengaged from space. It is the spirit revealed 
in intuition, the common, impersonal psyche, 
both subhuman and transhuman, which is the 
go in all going things. It is the elan vital. 
Not, however, the elan revealed in the mani- 
fest movement of existence here and now. 
As such, it is limited and inhibited by its 
opposite, matter. For "life is a movement, 
materiality is the inverse movement, and each 
of these two movements is simple, the matter 
which forms a world being an undivided flux, 
and undivided also the life that runs through 
it, cutting out in it living beings all along its 
track." 1 The "God, creator and free," must 
be something "vaster and higher," the eternal 
spring of both matter and life. The whole 
universe reveals the force which mounts and 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 299. 



198 William James and Henri Bergson 

the force which falls, and the movement is as 
from a center, "a center from which worlds 
shoot out like rockets in a fireworks display." 
This center fe God. God is not a thing, 
but a " continuity of shooting-out." "He has 
nothing of the ready-made; he is unceasing 
life, action, freedom." Unbounded by any 
environment, it is the utterly indeterminate 
spontaneity of becoming, self-contained and 
self-limited, hence in the traditional sense of 
the word, infinite. It is only "the force which 
is evolving throughout the organized world" 
that is a limited force, that is always seeking 
to transcend itself, that is always inadequate 
to its own aspirations. The center from which 
this force springs has not these limitations. 
It is the making, indifferently, of both matter 
and elan, and its bearing on human destiny 
therefore cannot with any honesty be said to 
be propitious. It is both the enemy and the 
friend, whereas the elan alone is utterly good, 
utterly a saving "more." Thus: 

Life appears in its entirety as an immense wave 
which, starting from a center, spreads outward, and 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 199 

which at almost the whole of its circumference is 
stopped and converted into oscillation: at one single 
point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has 
passed freely. It is this freedom that the human form 
registers. Everywhere but in man, consciousness has 
come to a stand; in man alone it has kept on its way. 
Man, then, continues the vital movement indefinitely, 
although he does not draw along with him all that life 
carries in itself. On other lines of evolution there have 
travelled other tendencies which life implied, and of 
which, since everything interpenetrates, man has 
doubtless kept something, but of which he has kept very 
little. It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we 
may call as we will, man, or superman, had sought to 
realize himself and had succeeded only by abandoning a 

part of himself on the way 

From this point of view, the discordances of which 
nature offers us the spectacle are singularly weakened. 
The organized world as a whole becomes the soil on 
which was to grow either man himself or a being who 
morally must resemble him. The animals, however 
distant they may be from our species, however hostile 
to it, have none the less been useful travelling com- 
panions on whom consciousness has unloaded whatever 
encumbrances it was dragging along and who have 
enabled it to rise, in man, to heights from which it sees 
an unlimited horizon open again before it. 1 

The elan, then, is good on the whole. That 
evils exist is not denied, but their source is not 

1 Ibid., pp. 266, 267. 



200 William James and Henri Bergson 

the elan itself. Their source is the obstruction 
that the elan meets. This always opposes it, 
turns it aside, divides it. For this elan, being 
finite, cannot overcome all obstacles, and the 
conflict with those obstacles comprises organic 
evolution. This is individuation of the initial 
impetus which has been given once for all, and 
individuation with its consequent individuali- 
ties are the basis and the source of evil. Each 
species thinks only for itself and lives only for 
itself, creating thus the " numberless struggles 
that occur in nature," the " discord as striking 
as it is terrible." But for this discord "the 
original principle of life must not be held respon- 
sible."* 

The original principle of life! Not, how- 
ever, God, the central source of this principle; 
the central source of its enemy, matter; in 
whom both of these are one; between whom 
and man they move in ascending and descend- 
ing hierarchies. Man seems to be the cosmic 
destiny by the cosmos' own choice, the goal and 
pinnacle of creation, the very image of God. 

1 Ibid., p. 255. Italics mine. 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 201 

And yet this god, if god it is, is a finite and 
lesser god, and the goodness of the ascending 
flux of spirit with which man's spirit is coinci- 
dent in intuition is counterbalanced and over- 
weighed by the evil of the descending flux of 
matter, the great enemy of essential man. 
The opposing flux seems to be of an inverse 
order, the devil, a machine; while the great 
source of both is a center of indifference morally, 
quite as much as it is a center of continuous 
creation. 

Hence, Bergson seems on the one hand to 
entertain conceptions that are hardly to be 
distinguished from orthodox theism, and, in 
so far forth, to be in tendency (only in tend- 
ency) of the same opinion as James. He asserts 
the probability of a Fechnerian hierarchy of 
beings, one within the other. There exist, 
he argues, objects both inferior and superior 
to us, although, nevertheless, in a certain sense, 
within us. Intuition reveals their harmonious 
existence. Once you instal yourself by an act 
of intuition within the heart of duration, you 
cannot help perceiving this. For all intuition 



202 William James and Henri Bergson 

is o'f the same genus, no doubt, but of different 
species. And each species is identical with 
a distinct degree of being. These degrees 
you perceive in intuition. You are there 
possessed by the perception of a certain very 
definite durational tension, and its definite- 
ness has the appearance of a choice among an 
infinity of possible durations. Thence you 
perceive as many durations as you please, each 
different from its fellows, and all different from 
each other. They constitute, however, a Berg- 
sonian continuity, a continuity which you may 
follow, whether up or down. The pursuit 
will cost you enormous effort; it requires you 
to do violence to your normal selfhood. But 
the reward of violence is an expansion in which 
you transcend your normal selfhood. You 
may move down, from quality to quantity, to 
the pure repetition by which matter is desig- 
nated, or up, to eternity. The movement is 
without a joint or break, an ineffable, inter- 
penetrating many-in-one. Its uppermost limit 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 203 

is not the barren and inert eternity of 
Spinoza's God but rather the overflowing 
goodness of Philo's and Plotinos'. It is "a 
living, ever-moving eternity, where we find 
our own duration, as vibrations are found in 
light, and eternity which is the concretion of 
all duration just as matter is its deglutition." 1 
And this absolute, concrete eternity embracing 
both matter and spirit is the greatest God of 
all. God, so defined, however, is an utter 
totality. It is prior to the degrees and steps 
of duration, both the subhuman and the trans- 
human, by coincidence with which man attains 
its completeness. From it all these derive; 
upon it, all depend; while in itself it is exter- 
nal to nothing and depends upon nothing. 

So that, on the other hand, the Bergsonian 
vision soars to an utter God of gods whose 
total immanence constitutes the reality of all 
that is. Herein it allies itself with historic 
idealism and monism, with the radical anti- 

1 Cf. Introduction a la ntetaphysique, pp. 20, 25. 



204 William James and Henri Bergson 

orthodox position concerning the nature of 
religion's God. This position is and has ever 
been the position of the philosophic tradition. 
It makes no consummation of the common 
report of many men. It abandons the expe- 
riential records of that daily life which com- 
munes with the gods. It reconstitutes the 
latter into a transcendental totality which 
becomes the subject of dialectic discourse. 
It identifies religion with philosophy. And 
this, in the end, is what Bergson does. " Intui- 
tion moves between these two extreme limits 
[matter and eternity] and this movement is 
metaphysics itself." 1 

Touching the moral bearings of the inter- 
mediate durations, their ultimate relation to 
man and his destiny, Bergson says explicitly 
nothing. There are only the hints concerning 
the goodness of the elan as a whole, the tendency 
of each degree to think only of itself, and the 
consequent evil. May not a wider duration 
think only of itself? and therefore, even 
though spirit, be the enemy of man? And 

1 Cf. Introduction a la meta physique, p. 25. 



Divinity — Its Nature and Its Role 205 

is not the all-good elan itself, favoring man as 
such, yet as a whole, if not on the whole, the 
enemy of each and every one of its parts? 
What is the destiny of man if the world be as 
Bergson describes it? And what, if it be as 
James describes it ? 



CHAPTER VI 

THE ORIGIN AND DESTINY OF MAN 

If the feeling of substantial identity with 
the all-creative force be religious feeling, if 
the perception of that identity in intuition be 
religious experience, if the designation of that 
force as good on the whole be religious assur- 
ance, if the characterization of man as the 
implicit goal of creative evolution be religious 
providence, then Bergson is orthodoxly reli- 
gious, in the essential sense of the term. There 
are difficulties, however, as we have seen, in 
reconciling this conception with whatever 
explicit statements concerning the nature of 
God Bergson has made. If the elan vital is 
God, then the universal center of creation from 
which springs matter (peer of the elan), is a 
super-god. And if what is overt and distinct- 
ive in human nature is at a qualitatively far 
remove from the elan, how much more alien 
must it be to the " center of continuous 

creation"! 

206 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 207 

There is an inevitable antithesis and oppo- 
sition between what is distinctly human and 
what is cosmic. It is the abandonment of its 
humanity, not the bold and convinced mainte- 
nance of it, that reunites our spirit with the 
cosmic spirit. Intuition is an " inversion 5 ' 
of the most determinate and fixed direction 
of the overt life, a rupture of the most " cher- 
ished habits" of the soul. What is uniquely 
human in us, our intelligence, is the very stuff 
and being of matter, not of spirit. None the 
less, in man the elan has freed itself from the 
restrictions and opposition of matter, and men 
are free wills, integrally and completely creative, 
renewers, the paragons of earth! A contra- 
diction, this? Not necessarily. Just because 
God is the flowing of spirit and matter at one 
and the same time; just because in God these 
streams cross and combat one another; just 
because all reality is this immense dualism, 
there is no life whose nature is an individuation 
of the cosmical elan which, by that very fact, 
does not deeply and completely participate in 
the dualism, and man more than all. For 



208 William James and Henri Bergson 

man is a microcosm. He images the world. 
In him, corresponding to the spirit and matter 
of the universal cosmos, are instinct and intelli- 
gence, with intelligence dominant. Indeed 
he does live and move and have his being in the 
absolute. And for that very reason, the truly 
he of him, the differentiae that constitute his 
humanity, are mere appearance, and his indi- 
viduality is a thing secondary, not primary. 
It is primary only in his selfishness and ego- 
centricity, only because he regards himself as 
the be-all and end-all of this cosmic evolution. 
Bergson does not disapprove this self -regarding 
attitude. Indeed he may be said to warrant 
it by his designation of man as the cosmic goal. 
But he holds it to be none the less the source 
of all evil, and pure good to be only in the unin- 
dividuated totality of the elan. 

What then is the nature of human individu- 
ality? What its status? What its destiny? 

The cosmic life, confronted and opposed 
by matter, seeks to break through the obstruc- 
tion, to overcome it, to abolish it. But 
abolition is impossible; matter is as durable 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 209 

as life. Life proceeds, therefore, by " insin- 
uating" itself into matter, by even adopting 
matter's rhythms, by so molding, organizing, 
shaping matter that its geometric rigidity 
becomes flexible, that its determination becomes 
indetermination, its necessity as nearly freedom 
as may be. The goal of life is its own free 
mobility. The enemy of that mobility is 
matter. Hence the work of life is the con- 
quest of matter. Organic existence in all its 
ranges of kind and complexity is just so many 
experiments which life makes in the conquest 
of matter, just so many attempts at escape 
from the material prison in which life finds 
itself inclosed. For this reason, living bodies 
represent, in the light of the intention and 
potency of life, so many obstacles avoided, not 
so many tasks achieved. By means of none, 
however, are obstacles so completely avoided 
as by means of the central nervous system in 
man, particularly by his brain. The brain is 
a very " center of indetermination." It pre- 
sents to the psychic stream an enormous variety 
of paths of discharge, and it allows the stream 



210 William James and Henri Bergs on 

of consciousness to be at each moment of its 
flow an inward fiat, undetermined by the 
brain's mechanical constitution; a chosen 
movement, unique, novel, simple, in an unfore- 
seeable direction along one of the countless 
paths of discharge which comprise the cen- 
tral structure. 

The consciousness so arising and so per- 
ceived is not any longer, however, that cosmic 
spirit, multiple yet interpenetratively one, 
which is opposed to matter, matter being no 
less than life an undivided flux, but " weighted 
with geometry." This consciousness is quite 
another thing, and its existence means a specific 
modification of the flux of both matter and 
spirit. Each of these is a continuance. But 
the continuity of spirit is cumulative, spirit 
endures and grows; while the continuity of 
matter is conservative, matter redistributes 
and repeats. Spiritual action elapses; mate- 
rial action is instantaneous. Consequently 
spirit is free, creative, unique from pulse to 
pulse; matter is mechanical, repetitive, com- 
mon, and the same from pulse to pulse. Both, 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 211 

in their totality, are impersonal. The evolu- 
tion of organic life is personalization of the 
impersonal. In the person, life has given up 
some of its spontaneity, matter some of its 
rigidity, and personification is the process of 
this mutual interaccommodation. 

The two encounter each other first in "pure 
perception/' This is the direct contact of 
spirit and matter, a contact unindividualized 
and universal. Life's task, if it is to vanquish 
in this encounter, must be to overcome the 
inertia of matter, to delay the mechanical and 
ceaseless repetition of the same which is 
matter's action, to prolong this action from 
instantaneity to duration. If it can do this, 
it can open an outlet in matter through which 
consciousness may flow. And it does do this 
in organic bodies, particularly in human bodies, 
with their infinitely complex brains. The 
organic body is cut out and set somewhat apart 
from the cosmic continuity of matter; it has 
a freedom of movement and activity which the 
non-organic does not possess; and more par- 
ticularly, it has a liberty of response that 



212 William James and Henri Bergson 

inorganic bodies do not possess. The latter 
are compelled to react to and to transmit any 
action that they receive in a predetermined 
direction and a fixed mode. Not so organic 
bodies. And most completely not so the 
human body with its central nervous system. 
This, indeed, is nothing but a " center of inde- 
termination." In it reaction is not immediate, 
but suspended; activity accumulates, gets 
turned into the potential action of the body. 
But this accumulating and enduring activity 
is life, is spirit itself, set free from the self- 
annulling instantaneity of reaction which is 
matter. Yet it is no longer, on this level, the 
pure transcendental spirit. On this level, it is 
spirit literally incarnate, personalized; and 
the incarnation and personification have con- 
sisted in the enchannelment of the cumu- 
lative activity within the motor organs of 
the body. So enchanneled, it exists as the 
consciousness we feel in the daily life. It is 
nothing more than the potential action of 
the physical organism, nothing more than the 
outline of this action, reflected back upon 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 213 

the material continuum whence the action 
came. 

Personification, then, is, in its first phase, 
limitation, enchannelment. There is to be 
found in it, on the level of pure perception, 
something more akin to matter than to spirit. 
It is no more than the spirit in matter, 
liberated. Complete personality, however, 
demands more than that. It demands biog- 
raphy, intimacy, memory. And these are what 
is supplied. For the incoming activity, which, 
by means of the brain, is arrested and accu- 
mulated, looks not only back to its source, in 
the character of the form of the body's poten- 
tial reaction to that source, it looks also inward 
to the creative spirit which is the life of the 
body. At the same time that it outlines in 
matter, as a reflection, our eventual action 
upon it, it is also reflected in memory, and there 
dissolved into spirit and sucked down below 
the level of consciousness. Now this dual 
movement has required changes in the body, 
and these changes are copresent. Consciousness 
feels them. It feels them to be quite different 



214 William James and Henri Bergs on 

from memory or perception, neither the outline 
of an action that may be, nor the quality of an 
action that has been. They are a real action, 
"the permanent and unique" factor in that 
group of "images" with which the needs of 
consciousness are concerned. To this, then, 
both perception and memory attach them- 
selves, and when they are so attached, the triad 
constitutes a "person." Perception reaches 
outward into matter; memory inward to 
spirit; in the action of the body, these two 
mingle their lights, and spirit overcomes the 
resistance of matter. One's body is thus a 
center in which there flows a congeries of accu- 
mulating possibilities of action; about which 
there floats the integrate fusion of one's his- 
tory in the unity of one's past, the condensation 
of one's history. For memory, let me repeat, 
is perception joining spirit instead of going 
back to matter. It "doubles perception" 
and conserves itself automatically, though 
subconsciously. It is narrowed down to per- 
sonality, is kept distinct and individual by 
being attached to the body. Each unique 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 215 

item of one's unique past is a guide directing 
the motor mechanisms of the nervous system. 
The body's needs raise it from the level of the 
unconscious past to that of the conscious 
present, materialize it; nor is there anything 
more in the present than the feelings of the 
body and of the guiding memories taking form 
through its needs. 

The consciousness of our lives from day to 
day, it follows, the selfhood that is near and 
characteristic and individual and personal is 
always the present. Whatever it contains that 
is truly unique and other, truly individual, 
depends upon the body, which alone can invoke 
the images of memory from the depths of the 
subconscious, the impersonal spirit, which is 
pure activity. But such a recalling is an 
exteriorization of what is interpenetrative and 
one. It is a spatialization of spirit. Hence 
our life proceeds on an artificial and super- 
ficial level, and the very quality of our natures 
makes it impossible for us naturally to appre- 
hend the spiritual reality from which we 
derive. 



216 William James and Henri Bergson 

For emphatically, what personalizes is that 
only which constitutes our present. And that 
is the feeling of the body's action. The imper- 
sonal is dragged out of its interpenetrative 
retreat to serve the needs of this action. Indi- 
viduality is physical, hence spatial. What- 
ever relates to it, therefore, must be equally 
spatial. In consequence our daily life, as 
described by empirical psychology, can be 
described in terms of habit, of association, of 
reflection. None of these terms applies to the 
depths of spirit. All apply to the levels of 
matter. What is distinctive about us is non- 
spiritual. 

How should this be, about us, in whom, as 
Bergson tells us repeatedly, spirit has broken 
the wall of matter and flows freely? It is 
because, in us, spirit has had "to adopt matter's 
very rhythms," to become matter. For what 
distinguishes man from other living creatures ? 
Intelligence. And what is intelligence if not 
an essential geometry in its form, and an essen- 
tial capacity to handle unorganized bodies, to 
construct machines, in its process. Geometry 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 217 

is the analysis of space, and space, the opposite 
of spirit, is the complete externality of points 
to one another, of points different merely in 
number, but in substance homogeneous. Its 
essence, therefore, is the repetition of identities, 
and this is the dominant principle of the 
" identity-logic," which is the form of intelli- 
gence. We think differents in terms of the 
same , always; our intellect can rearrange 
reality but can never discover anything new in 
it, nor deal with it in its totalities, as do crea- 
tures highly endowed with instincts, such as 
ants, bees, wasps, and women. Compare man 
with the other animals and you find that, on 
the one hand, he is, of all, least protected by 
nature and structure against the environment, 
while, on the other hand, he alone has organs 
not attached by specific function to a restricted 
environment. Man's hands are free. He has 
and exercises the capacity of using the material 
environment by manufacturing unorganized 
instruments of it, supplying himself out of it 
with what nature doesn't endow him: defense, 
shelter, food. 



218 William James and Henri Bergson 

To do this, man must understand and know 
his environment. But this environment is 
matter, and such understanding and knowing 
must be an adaptation to the habits of matter. 
Thus intelligence, in its use, is the insinuation 
of spirit into matter, the adoption of its rhythm 
and character. Intelligence is conscious mate- 
riality in action. It will tend, therefore, to 
establish relations, such as the Kantian cate- 
gories, by means of which things are external 
one to another — categories of equivalence, 
whole and part, causation, and so on. Intelli- 
gence is and acts the Kantian architectonic, 
the regulative principles of "pure reason." 
It is not, however, added to space from the 
outside, but derived from space from the in- 
side. Its forms and principles do, therefore, 
rightly constitute the presupposition of the in- 
ventive genius of man, the homo faber, and 
are the actual framework of the physicist's 
world of matter and space. In intelligence, 
spirit and matter are identical, and spirit even 
exceeds matter in its movement toward space. 
For matter never quite geometrizes; its content 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 219 

and form never become absolutely spatial; 
they exceed and deviate from the precision of 
law, their reality is never quite grasped by 
science. In intelligence, consequently, spirit 
completely inverts itself, where in matter 
spirit only partly inverts itself. What is most 
distinctive of man is least distinctive of the 
elan vital; what is individual is unreal. In 
the creative current of life the individual is 
only an excrescence on the essential progress 
which is the heart of life; a mere channel and 
thoroughfare, the essence of whose living resides 
in the movement by which life is transmitted. 
Race and individual, what is different and dis- 
tinct in them, are accidental and relatively 
unreal in the universe. Beside the creative 
center, the flux of life, the downrush of matter, 
the totality of organic beings, these former are 
unrealities, mere appearance, the superficies 
and last steps of becoming, not its deep and 
throbbing heart, not the "need to create." 

However, let no hopeful and aspiring mind 
fall to despair thereby. Ephemeral incident 
though the individual be, the undivided, 



220 William James and Henri Bergs on 

indivisible, creative onrush that belittles him 
also glorifies and saves him. The inward will 
to live in man is deceived by no illusion of 
immortality; even in his altogether partitive 
and individuate being, the elan has prefigured 
and shall perhaps continue him without the 
body. For in the corporate body of humanity, 
spirit possesses a machine which triumphs 
over mechanism; in the brain, in language, in 
social life, man has instruments that make 
for an ever greater and greater lability and 
spontaneity of action. And it is only as such 
a creative freedom that man has been pre- 
figured, not formally and teleologically. 
Human freedom, moreover, is not complete 
freedom; human consciousness is largely intel- 
lect; and the totality of freedom is not alone 
creative of matter, but of spirit also: to intel- 
lect must be added intuition. "A complete 
and perfect humanity would be that in which 
these two forms of conscious activity should 
attain their full development." 1 Such a human- 
ity would possess in intuition all that is given 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 159. 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 221 

to intellect and instinct both, the deepest unity 
of the spiritual life. 1 

Such a humanity will see "the life of the 
body just where it really is, on the road that 
leads to the life of the spirit." It will see the 
spirit there, as a rising wave, composed of 
innumerable interpenetrating potentialities, 
a continuous elan, neither one nor many. It 
will see this elan in its onrush, breaking up by 
force of the matter through which it flows 
into individuals, but individuals which "are 
vaguely indicated in it" and need the help 
of matter to become clear. They pre-exist, 
indeed, and yet are created. Matter helps 
them to pass from potentiality to actuality, 
and the body is this aid. And even as the 
individual was "vaguely indicated" before 
his incarnation in matter, so, enriched by his 
experience in the body, he may go on, after 
his separation from the body; "the destiny of 
consciousness .... is not bound up with the 
destiny of cerebral matter." 2 Indeed, in the 
attack of life upon matter, "the whole of 

I Ibid. ) p. 267. 2 Ibid., p. 270. 



222 William James and Henri Bergson 

humanity in space and time is one immense 
army galloping beside and before and behind 
each of us in an overwhelming charge able 
to beat down every resistance and to clear 
the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even 
death." 1 

So individuality is derived, justified, abol- 
ished and resurrected, all in one stroke of 
intuition. Purely a limitation and narrowing 
of the wider stream of spirit which is life itself, 
an excrescence and excess, its status is alto- 
gether secondary and representative. It holds 
neither strength nor excellence in its own 
right: all its goodness comes to it by grace of 
the " larger life" from which matter breaks it, 
and all its goodness must to that life return: 
to find itself it must deny itself. The intuition 
is contradictory, but eminently satisfactory 
in its compensatory import. 

Now to William James nothing could be 
more repugnant than a conception of indi- 
viduality like this. To him the pre-existence 
or the postexistence of individuals was largely 

1 Op. cit., p. 271. 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 223 

unimportant. But individuality as such, 
whatever its origin or level, he held most pre- 
cious. It is that which impresses him in 
Bergson himself: " Neither one of Taine's 
famous principles of explanations of great men, 
the race, the environment, or the moment, no, 
nor all three together will explain that pecul- 
iar way of looking at things that constitutes 
his mental individuality. Originality in men 
dates from nothing previous, other things date 
from it rather." 1 There is an absolute and 
irreducible hceceitas in individuality, fore- 
shadowed not even dimly, furnished by neither 
matter nor spirit, but the very uniqueness and 
peculiarity of the particular life which is both, 
given as that uniqueness and peculiarity, w^hich 
alone is the potent and operative thing in 
human life, determining its social direction 
and establishing its particular worth. 

Its origin, consequently, is a matter of 
indifference. James assumes the Darwinian 
hypothesis, naturally: what is human in man 
is a spontaneous variation, a mutation upon 

1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 226. 



224 William James and Henri Bergs on 

the subhuman surviving by force of its inward 
power. What matters to him, however, is 
this: that, whatever the origin of individual- 
ity, whether it be primary or derived, once it 
it occurs, it is the thing that counts, not its 
source. And it counts because there is in it 
something absolute and ^accountable, which 
cannot be brought back to a " larger whole/' 
a background, an environment, or a cause. 
In that unaccountable differentia lie its force, 
significance, and worth. What it is in its 
uniqueness defies analysis. Generically it is 
a dynamogenic activity of " appropriation" 
whose center and " invariant" is the body, and 
whose " continuous identity" as personal con- 
sciousness is "the practical fact that new expe- 
riences come which look back on the old ones, 
find them "warm," and greet and appropriate 
them as "mine." The "warmth" is a group 
of somatic feelings of direction: that is, of 
"attention," of "interest," of the vividness 
and immediacy of motor consciousness. This 
group is the I, the me, the central and nuclear 
self, appropriation by which gives any entity 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 225 

a personic status and a place in a biography. 
The stuff of it is " constant play of further- 
ances and hindrances in my thinking, of checks 
and releases, of tendencies which run with 
desire and tendencies which run the other 

way The mutual inconsistencies and 

agreements, reinforcements and obstructions, 
which obtain among these objective matters, 
reverberate backward and produce what seems 
to be incessant reactions of my spontaneity 
upon them, welcoming or opposing, appro- 
priating or disowning, striving with or against, 
saying yes or no. This palpitating inward life 
is ... . that central nucleus," 1 that core of 
adjustments continually repeated, to all which 
the stream of thought brings up. This " all" is 
made up of parts as variable and conflicting 
as the central core itself, and even more so; 
and any harmonious congregations of such 
parts may constitute a self which is both a 
peer and in fact a dilemmatic alternative of 
perhaps a hundred other such harmonious 
congregations. Experience is thus always 

1 Principles of Psychology, I, 299. 



226 William James and Henri Bergs on 

saying to the individual either -or; "either mil- 
lionaire or saint, either bon vivant or philan- 
thropist : either philosopher or lady-killer. ' ' To 
the honest observer the mind is a theater of 
gregarious and struggling possibilities, all equal, 
but only one capable of realization at any time. 
Its individuality is constituted ultimately by 
that unique quality of fiat, which, throughout 
a life, chooses a realization of a determinate 
kind. Its identity maintains and reveals itself 
as the continuity of this act of choice, or, where 
discontinuity is felt, as resemblance of the dis- 
continuities in some fundamental respect, for 
continuity and similarity carry onward the 
" warmth" and immediacy of the choosing or 
appropriating act. And selfhood is at its core 
exactly this passing, this appropriation, this 
choosing — a bridge between what was the 
warm and living I, and what becomes this I. 

The universal conscious fact is not " feelings and 
thoughts exist/' but "I think " and "I feel." No 
psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of 
personal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so 
to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them 
of their worth. A French writer, speaking of our 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 227 

ideas, says somewhere, in a fit of anti-spiritualistic 
excitement, that, misled by certain peculiarities 
which they display, we "end by personifying" the 
procession which they make, such personification 
being regarded by him as a great philosophic blunder 
on our part. It could only be a blunder if the notion 
of personality meant something essentially different 
from anything to be found in the mental procession. 
But if the procession be itself the very "original" of 
the notion of personality, to personify it cannot 
possibly be wrong. It is already personified. There 
are no marks of personality to be gathered aliunde 
and then found lacking in the train of thought. It 
has them already, so that to whatever farther analysis 
we may subject that form of personal selfhood under 
which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain, 
true that the thoughts which psychology studies 
do continually tend to appear as parts of personal 
selves. 1 

The I or Ego is here not deduced, but dis- 
covered, as primary and immediate a datum 
of experience, at least, as any other, and in fact 
more primary and immediate than any other. 
Such accounts of self which the philosophic 
tradition gives, and Bergson's with them, are 
simply hypostases of some phase of the actual 
continuum of the " mental procession." 

1 Principles, I, 226 f. 



228 William James and Henri Bergs on 

The literature of the Self is large [writes James], 
but all its authors may be classed as radical or miti- 
gated representatives of ... . three schools .... 
substantialism, associationism, or transcendentalism. 
Our own opinion, must be classed apart, although it 
incorporates essential elements from all three schools. 
There need never have been a quarrel between asso- 
ciationism and its rival if the former had admitted the 
indecomposable unity of every pulse of thought 1 and 
the latter been willing to allow that "perishing" 
pulses of thought might recollect and know. 2 

Each Ego, then, consists of indecomposable 
pulses of thought — selections, recollections, 
and cognitions, operating together uniquely 
as an individual. It is a central and unceasing 
activity, a vortex of choosing, whose tendency 
and direction is the definitive constituent of 
character. It contains all that is empirically 
required to define the qualities and attributes 
of individuality and selfhood. There is no 
detachment from a greater mass, no indi- 
viduation, no decrease; rather the opposite. 
Individuality is much more a synthesis, an 
integration, than an analysis, and what is 

1 It is this that Bergson hypos tatizes. 

2 Principles, I, pp. 369 f . 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 229 

most characteristic of it, therefore, is not 
intellect as the form of matter , but intellect as 
the facile movement of spirit; intellect, conse- 
quently, not as a mere substitution for reality 
but as the very creative act, the inventiveness, 
of the human spirit. Therein it is that those 
great ideas grow which afterward become the 
organizing concepts of scientific systems; there, 
in a chaos of variations, both spontaneous and 
caused, from which the lower and more durable 
levels of existence afterward select — some, to 
conserve and to perpetuate; some, to destroy. 
There is the zone of insecurity, the formative 
zone of conscious life and growth; the seat, 
hence, of all the progress that mankind knows. 
Not the immediate push of society or the 
remoter onrush of an elan, but the constant 
choices of the individual, urge humanity 
forward. The flat of belief that asserts its 
object before it is assured of the being of that 
object, the inward "need to create," the 
demand for rationality in the individual soul 
as that soul reveals itself empirically — these 
and these alone are sufficient to alter and direct 



230 William James and Henri Bergson 

the movement of the universe and the destiny 
of man. 1 

The pluralistic insistence on individuality 
runs, we have seen, through all of James's 
thinking. It is perhaps nowhere so clear as 
in his utterances concerning the ultimate 
destiny of man. Morally, he urges over and 
again, not less than metaphysically, reality 
is a multiverse. There is a warfare of moral 
ideals. No part of existence was made/ar any 
other part; each is concerned primarily with 
itself, and tends to appropriate the others in 
the interests of its selfhood. The struggle for 
survival is ontological. It is the quality of 
existence through and through, so that por- 
tions of reality may be easily lost altogether 
beyond the shadow of a possibility of redemp- 
tion. A pluralism with time as its force, the 
world reveals nothing absolutely fixed, nothing 
absolutely certain. Risk attaches to every- 
thing: even the most firm "universal" proposi- 
tion involves a dangerous leap beyond evidence. 

x Cf. "The Importance of Individuals" in The Will to 
Believe, etc. 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 231 

Every doubt is a conflict in beliefs; every belief 
a bridge thrust across a darkness of ignorance, 
and the other shore, the shore of "fact" it is 
intended to reach, may not exist. 

Now overtly, the intimate essence of life is 
belief, belief being literally preference, choice, 
and the risk attached to believing. And beliefs 
are fertile and germinative; often they breed 
out of their very substance the object to which 
they attach, nowhere so much^as in social 
relations. Social facts exist in virtue of the 
"precursive faith in one another of those imme- 
diately concerned." The wish is father to the 
fact. And in our constant struggle for life, 
and amid the ever-present options, living, 
momentous, forced, 1 which that struggle 
engenders, belief, which is the act of having 
liefer, choosing one possibility out of the 
innumerable others, elects the direction of 
safety and o'erleaps uncertainty by action. 
When it does so with repeated success, it is 
reason, and the world it so binds satisfies "the 
sentiment of rationality." 

1 Cf. The Will to Believe, loc. cit. 



232 William James and Henri Bergson 

Further, for the reason that reality is a con- 
geries of struggling entities, its ultimate form 
and character depend more on any single indi- 
vidual or group within that congeries than on 
the mass as a whole. The salvation of man, 
consequently, is not preordained, but neither 
is it foreclosed. That it does not reside, for 
James, in any external assurance gained through 
pre-existent " deeper" or higher being, as Berg- 
son thinks, is obvious. Human salvation must 
inevitably be salvation by humanity. Nor 
human salvation alone. The gods themselves, 
if gods there be, may need our help and require 
perhaps to be sustained even as men sustain 
one another. Life, for this reason, can be, 
from the moral point of view, only what each 
man makes it. Its value lies in the conquest of 
the evil he, as an individual, finds in it, its 
literal reformation according to his personal 
lights. Civilization is such a reformation, 
such a harmonization of an alien nature with 
human nature, such a conversion of the f oreign- 
ness of being into intimacy and ease. Now in 
civilization, whose history is the history of 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 233 

mankind, nothing has been so potently direct- 
ive as the individual. Himself the field of 
persistent choosing, of a battle for existence 
between possibilities, he himself is the seat of 
what value reality has. This value relates to 
his inward demands, his beliefs and desires 
and strivings, and its compulsion upon him 
is not the compulsion of a pressure from with- 
out; it is that of an inward acceptance. There 
is no infallible authority, no dominating elan. 
Obligation exists for the individual on his own 
recognition and thereon alone. Consequently 
the good of one man is easily the poison of 
another, and conversely. The moral universe, 
too, is not a monarchy but a federal republic. 
Its positive mark is not certainty; its posi- 
tive mark is hope and fear. If men were 
really optimists and pessimists, they would 
be unanimous in action. But history is the 
history of attempted transmutations of evil 
into good, of actions impossible without 
belief in the efficacy of change; i.e., with- 
out hope and fear. Morally the universe is 
melioristic. 



234 William James and Henri Bergson 

Hence, what is of the highest importance in 
the general improvement cannot, of course, 
be the generality, and must be the individual. 
Society's most precious products are its undis- 
ciplinables. Its most creative and masterful 
dynamic forces are its unaccountable geniuses. 
Their function is that of a ferment, which sets 
loose and gives direction to the dormant and 
blind energies stored up in peoples. What 
were Germany without Bismarck? England 
without Bob Clive? Athens without Peri- 
cles? Once an individual of genius arises, he 
becomes a point of bifurcation, a cross-roads 
for society. If, in his nature, spontaneity or 
inventiveness is stronger than imitation, and 
if the environment responds to him favorably, 
the whole of society goes following after him, 
realizing undreamed-of powers, accomplishing 
unthought-of masteries. If not, he pays for 
being different by becoming the object of 
society's laughter and hatred. And any other 
view that denies this power to individuality 
is "an utterly vague and unscientific concep- 
tion, a lapse from modern scientific determinism 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 235 

into the most ancient oriental fatalism." For 
fundamentally only the individual must be 
reckoned, whether conceived deterministically 
as by " science" or indeterministically as 
by radical empiricism. "The notion that a 
people can run itself and its affairs anony- 
mously is now well known to be the silliest 
of absurdities. Mankind does nothing save 
through initiative on the part of inventors, 
great or small, and imitation by the rest of 
us. These are the sole factors active in 
social progress." 1 In the winning of the 
world and the amelioration of reality, the 
individual counts first, and therefore counts 
most. 

The winning of the world! But what, in the 
end, is won ? There is civilization, but how is 
civilization better than crude nature? Only 
in this: that, in the face of an overwhelming 
pluralism of existences, it confirms man's 
humanity to man, rather than abolishes it by 
absorption in a superhuman elan. James is no 
transcendentalist. He is a moralist, a humanist. 

1 Memories and Studies, p. 318. 



236 William James and Henri Bergs on 

The winning, he teaches, 1 is chiefly an assur- 
ance, the active sentiment of rationality, the 
feeling "of the sufficiency of the present mo- 
ment, of its absoluteness, the absence of all 
need to explain it, account for it, or justify it." 
It is the fluency of the movement of our proper 
life, ever enlarging its range and scope, so that 
more and more of the environing reality gets 
unified, more and more gets clear. Its empiri- 
cal content is the world, become a familiar 
place, in which the oncoming future is more 
and more assured, evil more and more elimi- 
nated, so that the congruity of reality with our 
spontaneous powers makes itself felt contin- 
uously: "there is no ' problem of the good.' " 
The rationalization of the world consists, in 
a word, of its civilization, and the sentiment of 
rationality is the feeling of intimacy, the con- 
tinuous widening "warmth" of appropriation 
which naturalizes the alien by dominion of 
law and the rule of good. Behind this con- 
quest, its very go and force, is the will to believe 
— in politics, in art, or in science; the will to 

1 Cf. ibid., "The Sentiment of Rationality." 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 237 

believe — the "sort of dumb conviction that 
the truth must be in one direction rather than 
another " — the "sort of preliminary assurance 
that a notion can be made to work." Reach- 
ing out far beyond evidence, in the bitter 
struggle for existence, the fittest belief or con- 
ception survives, and, surviving, confirms still 
more deeply in existence the human value 
that it both assumes and postulates. Faith 
thus is only a working hypothesis. Its test 
is our willingness to act upon it — "to act in a 
cause the prosperous issue of which is not 
certified to us in advance." Life is no game 
with loaded dice; its watchword must be 
courage, not peace. Ever the lonely and cour- 
ageous soul is winning its livelihood at the 
hazard of its life, ever the army of mankind 
follows along the way which that soul has 
opened. The beginning and the end of that 
way is humanity. Man hath no aim but man, 
no destiny but mankind. For ever his choice 
is of himself alone. 

It was to realize and to sustain this choice 
that the shortcomings of experience were 



238 William James and Henri Bergson 

repaired by the hypostatization of ideals — ideals 
being our instruments and programs of life — 
particularly of the universally human ideals, 
which the philosophic tradition, and Bergson 
with it, designates by the eulogium of reality — 
the ideals of the unity, eternity, goodness and 
spirituality of the world, and of the freedom 
and immortality of man. We have seen how 
careful James has been to indicate, with respect 
to most of these, just how much is actually 
discoverable as direct content of experience, 
just how much is really ideal, is but a standard 
of value by which our nature masters and 
judges its environment, a method of controlling 
the environment, a mode of functioning proper 
to the creative intelligence of mankind. In the 
large, and in the long run, the world is mani- 
fold, chaotic, chanceful, evil, a struggle for 
existence of innumerable entities whose stuff 
is temporal. These ideals are philosophic 
desiderates, not actual contents of experience; 
programs to be realized, not origins nor results 
to rest in. Objects of belief, they are believed 
in at constant risk, a risk that involves "cour- 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 239 

age weighted with responsibility — such courage 
as the Nelsons and Washingtons never failed 
to show after they had taken everything into 
account that might tell against their success 
and made every provision to minimize dis- 
aster." It is the courage of knowledge, not 
of illusion. If there are risks, "it is better to 
face them open-eyed than to act as if we did 
not know them to be there." 1 And to rest 
at ease in belief as a compensatory substitute 
for reality, to hypostatize its objects, by no 
matter what feeling or argument, is to be 
blind. "Openness of eye" is their watchful 
use in the reconstruction and discovery of 
reality. 

Even with respect to the most apparently 
inward and ultimate compensatory ideal, this 
openness of eye is necessary. If men do in 
fact survive after death, that fact, like the 
existence of the gods, must reveal itself as a 
datum of immediate experience. It must be 
subjected to the control and the tests which 
science applies to all data of experience. 

1 The Will to Believe, Preface, p. xi. 



240 William James and Henri Bergson 

Personally James was skeptical of the evidence 
for survival after death and unconcerned about 
such survival. To him, as to all great human- 
ists, humanity was a quality not a quantity, 
and it was with the excellences, not the dura- 
tion of our natures, that he occupied himself. 
But the belief in " immortality," an expression 
of our innermost nature, was to his humane 
view even more entitled to the tests of veri- 
fication than other beliefs. If we believe, 
therefore, let there be no obstructions in the 
way of free investigation. Let belief launch 
itself into the regions where its object is said 
to hide. Let it bring the light of honest and 
just thought and investigation into those, let 
it enter courageously into the struggle for 
survival among facts and ideas, ready and 
glad to die if need be. For if reality is really 
a fluxful congeries of beings, and every- 
thing must ultimately lapse, the important 
question for man is not "how long" but 
"how good" is the existence out of which 
he builds his life. "There is no conclusion," 
James writes measuredly in the very last 



The Origin and Destiny of Man 241 

paper his hand touched. " There is no con- 
clusion. What has concluded that we might 
conclude in regard to it? There are no 
fortunes to be told and there is no advice to 
be given — Farewell." 1 

For Bergson, it will be remembered, there 
is a conclusion, and that conclusion has been 
prefigured from the beginning. The conquest 
of death is implied metaphysically, not to be 
verified experientially. Man is born at home 
in the world, a microcosm essentially at one 
with it. For James the difference of man from 
the world is the fundamental thing. He is 
not born at home in it, he makes a home of it. 
Metaphysically and morally his life is self- 
grounded, and his enmities and friendships 
are equally attended with risk. He makes 
his destiny as an excellence, a value, not as 
a period of time. It resides in character rather 
than in length of days, and its watchword 
is Courage. By facing the risk open-eyed, 
man may master it, and if he fails, he will 
win by failing in so far as he has surrendered 

1 Memories and Studies, p. 410. 



242 William James and Henri Bergson 

nothing of his nature or his values to the 
enemy, in so far as he is able to say with Job, 
"I know that he will slay me; I have no hope: 
nevertheless will I maintain mine integrity 
before him." 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Activity, internal, no, note; 

creative, 125; James on, 

171 f. 
Animal, place of, in evolution, 

136. 
Antinomies, 140 f. 
Appearance, evil as, 3 ; idea as, 

88. 
Aristotle, theory of knowledge 

of, 61, 67. 
Auscultation, intellectual, 72. 

Belief as "sentiment of ration- 
ality," 231. 

Berkeley, 7. 

Bernard, St., 64, 65. 

Body, the organic, 211; and 
personality, 214; and spirit, 
221. 

Boehme, 64. 

Boutroux, E., 47, 48. 

Brain, human, in evolution, 
137 f.; importance of, 209. 

Causation, James on, 174. 
Cause and freedom, 123. 
Chance, 173 f. 

Change, 120 f.; James on, 175. 
Compensations in discourse, 6. 
Compensatory desiderates, 7, 

10, 15, 28. 
Concept and percept, 89; 

Bergson on, 98; James on, 

98. 



Concepts, 131; status of, 
146 f., 167 f. 

Consciousness, 179, 210; com- 
pounding of, 150; human, 
212; and the present, 215. 

Continuity, 156, 157. 

Control and intuition, 79; as 
truth, 1 01. 

Courage, 237, 241. 

Creative evolution, drama of, 
132 f. 

Dante, 64. 

Descartes, 1. 

Desiderates, philosophic, 4. 

Determinism, 124. 

Duration, 76, 77; hyposta- 
tized, 89, note; magnitude 
of intervals of, 122, 128. 

Eckhardt, 64. 

Elan vital, relation to Pla- 
tonic Idea, 108, note; as 
reality, 113; as the good, 
200. 

Empiricism, true, 71. 

Epicureans, 59. 

Experience, James's character- 
ization of, 159; Bergson on 
religious, 196; as philosophy, 
204. 

Fallacies of traditional meta- 
physics, 143. 
Flournoy, 47, 49. 



245 



246 William James and Henri Bergs on 



Freedom, 171, 173; and causa- 
tion, 123. 

Galileo, 19. 

God, concept of, 186; locus of, 
187; influence of, 188; op- 
erations of, 189; status of, 
192; finitude of, 194; de- 
pendence on man, 194; 
Bergson on, 196 f.; relation 
to man, 198; Bergson on 
moral status of, 200 f . 

Gods, the, and feeling, 186. 

Goethe, 1. 

Habit, cosmic, as law, 182. 
Hartley, 56. 
Hegel, 1. 
Holt, Edwin, 35. 
Homo fdber, 79. 
Hume, 7, 8, 56. 

Hypostasis of the instrument, 
16 f.; in science, 24. 

Ideals, 238. 

Ideas, Platonic, 60; and 

knowledge, 60; as knowl- 

edge-about, 86; as fact, 87; 

relation to elan vital, 107, 

108, note, 
Illusions, the philosophical, 121. 
Immediacy and knowledge, 

82 f.; and truth, 94. 
Immortality, 220; James on, 

239 f. 
Individuality and space, 216, 

219; James on, 223. 
Instinct and intuition, 75. 
Instrument, hypostasis of, 16 f. 



Intellect, James on, 229; and 
intuition, 75; and instinct, 

75- 

Intellectualism, vicious, 98, 99. 

Intelligence and matter, 216; 
and space, 218. 

Intuition, Bergson's definition 
of, 70; and instinct, 75; 
and control, 79; as hypos- 
tasis of instrument, 81; and 
knowledge- of- acquaintance, 
90, 94; and utility, 92; and 
truth, 92; and space, 129. 

Kant, 56, 57, 69, 70, 127, 140, 

171. 
Knowl edge-about, 84; relation 

to knowledge-of-acquaint- 

ance, 84; and immediacy, 89. 
Knowledge- of -acquaintance , 

82 ; and intuition, 90. 

Law as cosmic habit, 182. 

Leibniz, 56. 

Life, nature of, 119 f.; and 

mechanism, 124. 
Locke, 7. 

Man, relation to God, 198; 
antithesis to cosmic, 207; a 
microcosm, 208; homo faber, 
218; James on destiny of, 
230; salvation of, 232. 

Many and One, 140 f.; James 
on, 153. 

Matter, 77, 78, 113, 180, 
210; defined, 130 f.; James 
on, 164 f.; and personality, 
213; and intelligence, 216. 



Index 



247 



Meaning, pragmatic definition 
of, 81, 84; and knowledge- 
about, 86, 87. 

Melioristic, 233. 

Memory and personality, 213; 
and perception, 214. 

Menard, M., 47. 

Moisant, X., 64, note. 

Motion, nature of, 119. 

"Necessary connexion/' 8. 
Necessity, 124, 125. 
"New Philosophy/ ' the, 34. 
New Realism, 35 f., 50. 
Novelty, 171. 

One, the, of Plotinos, 63, 64, 
77; of Spinoza, 66; and the 
Many, 140 f.; James on, 53. 

Parallelism, psycho-physical, 

logical result of, 148. 
Pascal, 59. 
Past, the, 122. 
Pecten mollusc, 109, note. 
Percept and concept, 89; 

James on, 98. 
Percepts, 167 f. 
Personification, 210 f.; and the 

body, 214. 
Phidias, 1. 
Philosophy, relation to science, 

73 f. 
Pitkin, W. B., 47. 
Plato, 1, 55, 107, 108, 133; 

theory of knowledge of, 

59 f., 67, 80. 
Plotinos, theory of knowledge 

°f, 61, 67, 75, 78, note. 



Pragmatism, 13, 80, 81; thir- 
teen varieties of, 23, note; 
as a way of passing, 25 f.; 
on duration, 89, 90. 

Prediction, and change, 123. 

Present, the, 122. 

"Problem of Knowledge/ ' the, 
how raised, 55 f.; various 
solutions of, 58; Bergson's 
solution of, 69 f.; James's 
solution of, 69 f . 

"Pseudo-ideas," 142. 

Psychology, relation of, to 
philosophy, 6, 7. 

"Pure perception/' 131, 211; 
and memory, 214. 

Radical empiricism, 10, 27 f. 

Raphael, 1. 

Realism, James on, 177. 

Reality, 41; and appearance, 
3; and system, 22; percept 
as, 88; elan vital as, 113; 
definition of, 125 f.; James 
on, 152 f.; as chaos, 158; 
as mosaic, 162; and religion, 

185. 

Relations and truth, 97; 
dogma of unreality of, 143; 
Bergson on, 144; James on, 
145; externality of, 160, 
161; good and evil as, 182. 

Religion and reality, 185. 

Salvation, 232. 
Schelling, 59. 
Schopenhauer, 15. 
Science, relation to philosophy, 
73 *. 



248 William James and Henri Bergson 



Selfhood, priority of, 226. 
Sheffer, H. M., 64, note. 
Space, 113; Bergson's various 

views on, 126 f.; denned, 

128 f.; and intuition, 129; 

and individuality, 216. 
Spinoza, 108, 112, 133; episte- 

mology of, 65, 67, 80. 
Stoics, 59. 

Subconscious, the, 189 f. 
Substance, Spinozistic, and 

appearance, 108 f. 
Survival, cosmic struggle for, 

182. 
Systems of philosophy, nature 

of, 13; as reality, 22. 

Truth and hypothesis, 24, 84; 
Bergson on pragmatic con- 



ception of, 90 f.; and utility, 
91; and intuition, 92 f.; in 
the philosophic tradition, 
93; pragmatic conception of , 
94 f.; and relations, 97; 
hypostatized by Bergson, 
101; as control, 101. 
Tychism, 27. 

Utility and truth, 91; and 
intuition, 92 f. 

Vegetable, place of, in evolu- 
tion, 135. 

Will-to-believe, the, 236. 

Zeno, 140. 










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